


Orpheus's Rescue

by peacockgirl



Series: Orpheus Universe [1]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Eventual Fluff, F/M, Hell Bent/Face the Raven Fix-it, Post-Episode: s09e12 Hell Bent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-01-03
Updated: 2017-07-08
Packaged: 2018-05-11 07:22:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 44,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5618473
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/peacockgirl/pseuds/peacockgirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For everyone who liked the poignancy of Hell Bent & Face the Raven but wished for better for Clara and the Doctor. Clara has resolved to visit 101 more places before she dies, but after she discovers the Doctor has lied about losing his memories, will he really be able to let her go? Whouffaldi</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Eurydice's Lament

She'd see one hundred and one more places and then she’d die, Clara decided, remembering the cherished book that she’d left in her room in the TARDIS, its inside covers now filled with exotic locales the author could never even dream of. There was something fitting about that – a symmetry that could allow her to pretend she had some control over what had happened – what must happen next. She’d been out of control for so long now, and the headiness was beginning to wear off. Without the Doctor beside her she could no longer see the fun in running for your life when you meant to have a peaceful cup of tea.

Ashildr was fine enough company, but she never pulled an electric guitar out from under the TARDIS console and tried to convince Clara she’d actually written, “Don’t Stop Believing.” It was hard enough to get the girl – who was technically an old, old woman but still looked about sixteen – even to smile, let alone laugh. And there was also the bit where Clara’s predicament was technically her fault.

Honestly it would be most fitting – and far less hazardous for the universe – to limit herself to twelve more adventures, but that was too few. She wasn’t ready to go.

She told Ashildr the plan to hold her accountable. Having already seen its end the girl did not particularly care if the world burned because of Clara’s carelessness, but when Clara told her she could have the TARDIS when she was gone she took to counting down their adventures daily.

They ran like hell – because the Time Lords were after her and dying anywhere but that trap street might unravel the fabric of the universe.

They laughed – because it was a challenge, even though nothing really seemed funny anymore.

And Clara never ate a pear – even though they looked delicious in every marketplace. (She’d loved pears before she met the Doctor.)

The days were all right, mostly. There was so much to see and she was determined not to waste this second chance the Doctor had given her.

But the nights were torture.

Her body didn’t need to sleep but her human mind couldn’t withstand the constant stimulation. Every time she closed her eyes she relived the Doctor’s last goodbye, followed by their final encounter in the diner. The way he’d told her their story, even played a song named after her and then looked right through her tore her not-beating heart to shreds.

She understood why it needed to be done. He would go on being a Doctor now. The universe would be safe – as soon as she gave in to her fate and faced the raven.

It was kinder that he didn’t remember her. She knew that. Because being the sole carrier of their memories was a constant torment. Every day she contemplated whether something couldn’t be done. She could find a way to reverse the neural block – track him down. Or she could get him to take her on as a new companion, come up with a false identity. Spend her last days with him, even if he didn’t know it.

They’d never be her last days, then. It was the damn catch twenty-two that kept them apart, the curse of the hybrid. Instead of giving up on each other they’d tear the universe apart. And she couldn’t let her healer of worlds become a destroyer of worlds on her account. It might feel like she needed him more than the universe did, but she wasn’t so vain to think she was more important than every other living soul.

She’d thought it unfair when Danny died. That she’d been owed better. But this was true cruelty.

Although, she supposed she was holding all of time and space at ransom. Served the Timelords right to quake in their ostentatious boots a little.

It was a wonder her Doctor could be so good, coming from such a pompous, terrible lot.

She’s suffer anything to make sure he stayed that way.

For her forty eighth trip she went to visit Jane Austen, figuring she’d be good for a pick me up. She chose a date years after they’d last visited so she wouldn’t cross her own timestream.

She and Ashildr parted ways as soon as the TARDIS touched down, the girl claiming she didn’t want to impose. She was touchy whenever Clara encountered people she knew. She supposed the immortal was uncomfortable with the concept of friends.

At least it would save her from an awkward introduction, Clara thought as she turned onto the road to the Austen’s cottage and ran straight into the Doctor.

He caught her by the shoulders, his gruff: “Watch where you’re going,” becoming, “Clara. I told you to wait for me in the TARDIS,” as soon as he realized who he’d collided with.

She gaped at him, searching for an explanation. She knew they had never come here together in1815, and unlike his unreliable driving her TARDIS always took her exactly where she meant to go.

But he’d recognized her immediately, that much was obvious. She’d missed that so much that she couldn’t help but stare, drinking in his familiar appearance – her favorite velvet coat, his tousled grey hair and bushy eyebrows. But his eyes gave her pause. They were too old, too knowing, and they drank her in with the same desperation she felt coursing through her dormant chest.

“You remember.”

“I remember that you were supposed to wait for me in the TARDIS, but it’s hardly shocking, you swanning off. Never one for listening to directions, Miss Clara Oswald.”

“Don’t.” She felt fury building within her. The old Clara would have slapped him for trying to pull the wool over her eyes. She’d always had a tendency for hysterics. But now the anger built and simmered and she kept it at a distance. She understood him better now, the Oncoming Storm. “Everything we’ve both been through, don’t you lie to me. We never came here together in 1815. We didn’t come here together today.”

He seemed to deflate, and she could see how he’d been wearing bravado like a suit of armor. Her anger waivered. “No we did not,” he said solemnly. His tone took her back to their last encounter on the TARDIS, how sad he had been when he had explained how one of them would need to forget.

“How long have you remembered?”

He refused to meet her eyes, and she knew. “I never forgot.”

“How dare you.” Her hand twitched at her side as the fury became a vibrato, all the sleepless nights of misery looping through her. “Do you have any idea how much I agonized? Thinking that you couldn’t remember my face? Repeating the way you collapsed. But it was just one of your famous lies.”

“I do know. I remember that look on your face. And the way you stared at me in the diner, searching for some recognition as I told you the story. I know that look of yours, when your eyes get all large and moist. All I wanted to do was tell you the truth, but I couldn’t. I shouldn’t have done it now. But damn it all, Clara, you make me want to go back in time and erase all that heartbreak, consequences be damned.”

She wrapped her arms around herself. She had that look now, she knew, as she felt tears prickling behind her eyes. She had her best friend back and she wasn’t sure why she still felt so awful. “Why didn’t the neural block work?”

“It was set to human. You reverse the polarity – that’s why it didn’t affect you – but it wasn’t programmed to affect Timelords.”

She squeezed herself tighter. “So you knew you’d be fine. All that talk about leaving it to fate and doing it together was rubbish.”

“I didn’t know which of us it would affect. But I hoped you had reversed it.”

“Why?” she whispered.

“Because you wanted to keep your memories. And you deserve to have them.”

There was something in his voice she couldn’t place. A fondness she wasn’t quite used to but desperately missed. She felt the anger crumbling. She could never manage to stay mad at him for long, no matter how furious he made her.

“So why pretend?”

“Because if I hadn’t we’d be at the crossroads we’re at now.”

She closed her eyes against the headache, the heartbreak. She couldn’t look into his eyes as she said this. “It’s hardly a crossroads anymore. We’ll each get in our separate TARDIS and be on our way.”

“I’ve been hiding in Jane’s garden shed for nine months,” he answered, nonsensically, and Clara opened her eyes and stared.

“What?”

“You were fond of Jane. I figured you’d come back here if I waited long enough. I needed to see you again. I needed to ask you to come with me.”

She gaped, picturing the man and his TARDIS hiding for months in the tiny shed that wasn’t any bigger in the inside. The image was ridiculous but the sentiment behind it more inconceivable.  “How can you ask me that? You know that I can’t.” She had to pretend to be cross with him, because if she just stopped to consider his offer, even just for a moment –

She knew that she couldn’t, but if she let her want hold sway –

“Because.” He ran his hand through his hair, mood gone from manic to agitated in an instant. “Because. Damn it Clara!”

He strode towards her, and she thought he was going to embrace her, despite this body’s distaste for hugs. Instead he grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her off the path and behind a tree, and kissed her.

At first she was too shocked by his actions to contemplate the shock that ran through her as his lips executed some rather impressive gymnastics against her own. She and the Doctor were snogging in the shrubbery in _Jane Austen’s_ garden! By the time she got her wits about her enough to realize that she ought to kiss him back he had pulled away.  But his hands were still tangled in her hair, leaving his face close enough to her own that she could see the pulse pounding in his throat and his nostrils flare.

“Why did you do that?” she demanded, but her voice came out high and breathless.

“I thought human girls liked that sort of thing. Your Jane makes her living selling yarns of exactly this sort. That’s why I pulled us behind that tree. She could be watching. Her next heroine could be based off you. Rewrite the whole English canon you used to teach.”

“Doctor, please.” He was deflecting and distancing himself and although her lips still tingled the high was fading, and she was far too tired to play this game with him. It had been hard enough when she’d been well rested and he’d refused to show his hand.

“I did it because I spent the past year thinking about every time I should have kissed you but didn’t,” he said solemnly, as one hand untangled itself and rested softly against her cheek, cool but so surprisingly gentle. “Hell, I spent four billion years thinking that.”

Her breath hitched in her chest, because a voice in her head that sounded quite like Ashildr chanted, _too late, too late, too late._ “Why,” she pressed. “Why did you want to kiss me?”

He actually squirmed. “Does it really need saying?”

“Yes. With human beings it does need saying.”

He frowned, and he brushed away the tear that had fallen from her eye, and then threw back his shoulders as if he was preparing for war. “Fine. Then here it is, plain and simple. Clara Oswald, I love you.”

She stumbled backwards, the force of it almost too much to bear, _too late, too late, too late_ a rising crescendo. She’s spent so much time wishing, hoping, but then he’d changed and become so cold she’d seen the foolishness of trying to pin human emotions to a demigod. She’d accepted that her feelings would never be reciprocated, tried to move on until her attempt had got a decent man killed, and convinced herself that any time he was overly affectionate with her she was just reading too much into it. To hear that he truly did care – the mighty Time Lord admit to something as human as love – it should have made her joyous but instead it choked her with dread. Three hearts would break here today.

He followed her forwards, his face crumbling into something that seemed like panic. “Surely you knew that.”

She shook her head. Shook him off. “I hoped. Even suspected at times. But I never knew. Not for certain.”

“I was going to tell you, before the raven. You said you already knew.”

“The lying’s a bitch sometimes, isn’t it?” she answered. She was rarely so coarse with him but it was better than screaming out her frustration. “I didn’t know what you were going to say – only that whatever it is would have only hurt us both because there was nothing that could be done about it.”

“You also said that people like us should say things to one another. In the Cloisters. I learned, Clara. It took me a very, very long time because something I can be so thick. But I learned. I’m not afraid to say it any more. I’m not even afraid of what it means.”

He was offering her everything she’d ever wanted and all she felt was sick. It was worse, somehow, than those minutes when she knew she’d have to face the raven. Because the threat was still there and this time she knew what she was leaving behind.

This was why she hadn’t let him speak on Trap Street. Some tiny romantic part of her had wondered.

“You haven’t said anything.” Now he was shaking his head, biting his lip. “You don’t feel the same way and you’re trying to come up with a way to let me down easy. There isn’t a card for that, is there?”

It would be better to let him think that, maybe, but she couldn’t do it. “Of course I love you, you silly old man. I’ve loved you since the first adventure we had, and every fractured piece of me has loved the version of you it saved. I loved your stupid bowtie and these ginormous eyebrows. And if you had just told me this months ago.” She raised her fist to her mouth, biting down. She didn’t want to make him feel guilty yet part of her did, because it seems like this should have been avoidable and yet now it wasn’t. She could have spent the rest of a good long life with him, truly together in a way she’d only be able to dream, but instead she had to leave him to suffer alone, while she played at being alive for a few more months before she faced a pointless death – a death she’d actually died billions of years ago.

It was so bloody unfair. But if she said that, even hinted just how deeply she knew it, he’d tear the universe apart trying not to make it so.

“I’m telling you now. Isn’t that a start?”

“It’s too late,” she said, and the voice in her head wasn’t Ashildr – it was her.

“Come with me.” His voice trembled. “That’s not a request. It’s a command.”

She shook her head, the reminder of their last proper moments together strengthening her resolve. As the clock ticked down, she had understood him so clearly. She couldn’t forget that. “I can’t.”

“Yes you can. Don’t worry about time. We’ll set it to rights. There has to be a way.”

“But you don’t know what it is.”

“No,” he admitted.

“It’s because I love you that I can’t let you do that. You need to be the Doctor. Everything I said before the raven – it still applies. I can’t be the thing that changes you into something you can’t live with. Running from my fate will have terrible consequences, and I don’t want anyone to suffer because I was foolish. I know I shouldn’t be here now. This is borrowed time. But it’s limited. A hundred and one more trips I was going to take. I have fifty three left.”

“Then spend them with me,” he pleaded.

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?” she whispered. “But I’m not strong enough. And I don’t think you are either.”

“This isn’t like one of Jane’s books at all.”

She felt the smile tug at the corner of her mouth before she could help it, and then she was stumbling forward, wrapping him in the hug she’d been resisting since the moment she saw him.  His arms wrapped around her tightly as he buried his face in her hair.

“I suppose there is something pleasant about hugs, on occasion. If one has to say goodbye, best to do it this way.” His words rumbled through her, his brogue like a soft caress. She tilted her head back to look up at him.

His eyes were rimmed in red, and she wished she knew a way to ease his suffering. “I’ll call you when I have one adventure left. Perhaps we could take it together?”

He nodded. “I would like that.”

“Then this isn’t goodbye,” she said when she could finally force herself to pull away. “Just see you later.”

“Then I will see you later, Clara Oswald.” He tried to smile, and she appreciated the effort, even if it looked more like a grimace. “Perhaps in the meanwhile you could tell Jane that I’ve vacated her shed.”

“I will,” she said with an answering grin. She watched him return to said shed and listened to his TARDIS’s familiar screech. (Hers was so quiet it was like it never even touched down. He made waves wherever he went, and she barely made ripples.

Which was probably better. She shouldn’t have been anywhere near the water on her own.)

Then she turned and went to town to find Ashildr. There’d be no pranks with Jane today. The woman would see right through her, and Clara didn’t want to see her heartbreak staring back at her from someone else’s pages.

* * *

Eleven adventures later she went to see her former Doctor on Trenzalore.

She chose a date a few months after he’d sent her away for the second time, after Handles had died. His pain would still be fresh, she knew, and she hoped she could assuage it a bit.

She also hoped it might make him honest.

Ashildr stayed behind again. She was disapproving of her meddling, and nervous around the Doctor in general. Clara supposed she had not taken his threat in Trap Street lightly, even though Clara had begged him to be merciful.

Christmas was dark, as it typically was, but beautiful, with snow lightly falling and the town lit by tinsel and lights, as if the holiday it was named for truly held sway here all year long, even though it was the center of a war zone. She could see evidence of that war, buildings that were scorched and crumbled, but no one in the streets seemed afraid.

The Doctor had done this, she knew. And even though it hurt to think of him bunkering down here to die, he’d done so much good.  This was the man she loved, selfless and brave.

She found him in his tower, surrounded by his toys, and she couldn’t help but gasp as she drank in his floppy hair, big chin and trademark bowtie. She’d come to terms long ago with never seeing him like this again, but there was something so comfortable and familiar about his appearance. She’d understood him better in this body, she thought. Or at least they’d both been better at pretending that was true.

He looked up at the sound of her shock and frowned. “How did you get here? The TARDIS is parked outside this time, and you weren’t hanging on. I checked.”

His harshness was nothing compared to her current Doctor’s normal tone. She had to keep herself from gasping again as their eyes met. He was old for this body – though not as old as he’d be by the end – lines beginning to crease his boyish face. But his eyes, though weary, were so young.

“I didn’t come in your TARDIS,” she answered. “And I’m not stayin’, don’t you worry. I have a question for you.”

“If you didn’t come in my TARDIS, then how?”

“Got my own wheels,” she answered, and then clenched her teeth as she fought off the truth field’s influence as it tried to persuade her to spill more details. “Didn’t mean to say that. Don’t ask. I shouldn’t tell you. Spoilers.”

The Doctor’s nose wrinkled. “Don’t say that. I hate it when River says that.”

He looked so adorable perturbed, and she pulled up a chair to sit across from him. “Fine. I won’t. But don’t ask. It’s better that you don’t know. I don’t want to risk changing what’s already happened.”

“You shouldn’t have come here and crossed the timelines.”

“I know,” she said. “But I don’t care. Got that from you, I think. You never cared about that quite as much as you should.”

“I know. That was a problem with this body. I used to be very strict about that sort of thing. Got very mad at Rose once for wanting to see her dead father. Reapers almost unraveled the universe. But I got old, reckless.”

She reached out and folded his hand in her own. He must have been lonely, with Handles gone. He’d never spoken much about those who had come before her. Certainly not without her prompting and a decent amount of alcohol.

He squeezed her hand back. His fingers were calloused and wrinkled, but there was still strength there. “Clara.” He said her name with such fondness that she wanted to giggle like a schoolgirl. She’d had such a crush. He’d been flirty yet oblivious, and absolutely ridiculous, but he’d looked at her like she was the most precious thing in the universe and she had felt so special.

“Doctor.”

“Why are you here?”

She tried for levity. “Think of me as the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.”

“I’ve done that before, actually. On another planet. With fish that swam in the sky!”

She could not look away from his face – his daft, handsome, long-gone face. “I have a question for you.”

“Ah. And just like the Timelords you know this is the place where I’ll have to answer it.”

She blushed, a little guilty – but not enough to put her off her mission. “It’s not your name, I promise. Besides, I already know that.”

“You look – so much older,” he said, and her hand twitched in shock. It really hadn’t been all that many years for her since this day – especially not compared to what he had lived – and her Doctor hadn’t been able to tell when her dream crab self had aged sixty years. “It’s not your face. You’re not even wrinkly. But your eyes – they’re wise. But so sad.”

The fact that he could see that so readily brought tears to her eyes. Why had his next self lost the ability? Would she even have had to come here if he hadn’t?

“It’s me, isn’t it?” he asked softly. “Oh Clara. What have I done to hurt you?”

She cleared her throat, swiped away the tear from under her eye and tried to be brave, even though everything inside her wanted to answer.

“Why did you send me away? Twice?”

They were still holding hands over his workbench. He flipped her hand over gently, and ran his thumb across her palm, sending shivers down her spine.

“You know that I’m not affected by the truth field anymore,” he said slowly. “Not after all this time.”

“Course I do. Good liar like you. Even I’m getting used to avoiding it a bit.” She chuckled, even though it felt strange, because he’d asked her to once. “But I’m hoping you’ll answer me anyway.”

“I told you, not that long ago. I would have buried you.”

“But why couldn’t you do that? Taking up with human the way you do, you must know you’ll outlive us.”

“But I don’t want to see it.”

She wanted to pull her hand away but didn’t. He needed this comfort now, even more than she did, even if he was being difficult.

Perhaps she had expected too much. They’d never been much good at being honest with each other.

“That’s all then.”

“No.” Their eyes met, and she was caught in that old, wise-manic gaze. “I would have sent anyone away, to protect them. Sending you away – lying about it – it was both harder and easier than if you’d been anyone else. Because I love you, Clara, and I couldn’t let you die in this place. A selfish part of me wanted to keep you beside me for as long as I could, just to keep making each day that much brighter, but you deserved so much better. So I sent you back to your family. Christmas dinner. I wish you wouldn’t be mad. I never meant to fall in love with you. I don’t typically do that. Only once before and that ended badly for her. Well, not as bad as it might have, but I had to send her away too and I think that hurt her more than I meant it to. You see, that’s why I tried so hard not to love again. It’s not to protect myself. You’re right – I always outlive my companions in the end, and it always hurts when they leave, no matter why. But when they love me too much, the parting hurts them in ways I can’t fix, and I’d rather avoid that. Like now. You were probably better not knowing all this. I’m sorry. I guess I’m not as immune to the truth field as I thought.”

But it didn’t hurt as much to hear the second time around. It was what she’d come for after all. She straightened his bowtie, pushed his wild bangs out of his eyes. “It’s all right. I already knew. Just wanted to hear it from your lips.”

“You have always been a marvel, Clara. My impossible girl.”

“That’s me.” Her life had seemed so much simpler then – swanning off on adventures between classes or babysitting duty. He’d been the one trying to figure her out. It was once he changed, and she committed to being by his side full time that she’d started to change too.

“I have another question.”

He smiled at her. “Ask away. Can’t be as hard as the last one.”

Something about the openness in his face made her bold. Her Doctor didn’t invite questions, not anymore. He’d kept his past and his emotions locked up like his guitar case. “May I kiss you?”

“No one’s asked me that before. They just do.”

She thought of River, Tasha Lem, and every other woman she’d ever seen flirt with him, and it made her a little bit furious. “Well I’m askin’.”

She saw the way his eyes drifted to her lips, just for a moment, and her stomach erupted in butterflies – the giant, eight winged alien kind they’d encountered once on the moon of Foon. “If you like.”

It was soft and tender, nothing like their garden kiss, but absolutely lovely. Afterwards she flung herself into the crook of his neck, and he’d always given the most remarkable hugs. She felt safe in his arms, and cherished, and now, finally, loved.

When she pulled away he pushed her hair behind her ear, so carefully, but there was something troubled in his eyes.

“Clara,” he said softly. “I don’t wish to alarm you, but you’re not breathing.”

He reached in his pocket for his screwdriver but she stopped him. “I know. My heart’s not beating either.”

“What’s happened to you?”

“I can’t tell you that.” She glanced out the window and saw the first vestiges of light. “It’s almost sunrise. Shall we watch it together?”

The walked hand in hand to the roof. There she snuggled beside him, her head on his shoulder and his arm wrapped around hers. She would have this memory forever now – the length of forty two adventures.

He’d have it much longer.

The sunrise was glorious; being so short-lived couldn’t diminish any of its beauty.

“This isn’t the last time we see each other,” she told him as the light began to fade. “Don’t give up. Don’t despair. This isn’t the end for you.”

“You shouldn’t tell me that.”

“I’m not giving you any of the details. Just telling you not to lose hope.”

“There isn’t a way out of this, Clara.”

“Maybe not one that you can see,” she teased. “But I’ve always been just a little bit cleverer than you.”

“No one’s cleverer than me,” he protested, and she laughed. This time it was real and true.

“Typically not,” she amended. “But on occasion.”

“You have to go,” he realized.

“I have to go,” she echoed. “But I’ll be back. Someday.”

“I’ll wait for you.” He smiled. “It’s funny. Usually other people have to do the waiting.”

“Just keep on being the Doctor.” She wrapped herself in another of his famous hugs, hoping it would sustain her through the days ahead.

“I love you too,” she said as she pulled away.

“That was always rather obvious.”

She was going to blame the truth field for that one. She pushed him lightly, smirking. “It was, wasn’t it?”

* * *

The warmth of that chill night on Christmas carried her through her next destinations, and Ashildr asked her frequently what she’d done to put herself in a better mood, but the truth field was out of range so she told no one but her diary. Somehow she was more at peace with what was coming. The Doctor had faced his raven for hundreds of years, staying just as kind, never fleeing, even after he had his TARDIS back. She could face hers just as bravely.

He would be all right, just as long as she could convince him she didn’t need saving.

She made the call after her and Ashildr toured the pyramids, the last destination in _101 Places to See_ she had yet to visit. He gave her a set of coordinates, and she promised Ashildr that she’ll be back in three days, and asked her to follow if she wasn’t.

Her TARDIS landed on a green rolling hill with a city in the distance. But all she could pay attention to was his TARDIS. The old girl seemed to be calling to her, even though it was troublesome more often than not when they were traveling together.

She forgot all about his TARDIS when the Doctor himself emerged, looking properly dapper in his velvet coat, with his hair neatly combed. But his guitar was strapped across his back and he wore his sonic sunglasses. She was never quite sure why he’d fancied himself a bit of a rockstar after the face-hugging dream crab Christmas, but she kind of loved it.

She tried to walk toward him all dignified like but he smiled when he saw her, and he was wearing those ridiculous glasses, and the excitement bubbled over and she barreled toward him. He caught her tightly, and she could feel him press a kiss to the top of her head as he breathed her in.

“Hello,” she said, all her nerves vanished.

“Does your TARDIS look like an American diner all the time?” he asked, staring past her shoulder.

She laughed, because surely this was a sign he was going to be okay. “You’re one to talk.”

“A police box blends in,” he defended. “But a restaurant? And one with such garish decorations. Surely you attract attention.”

“Ashildr insisted on fixing the chameleon circuit. But I like it.”

The Doctor released her but tucked her into his side, weaving their hands together. “It’s so quiet,” he said with obvious disapproval, and she laughed again, knowing that it must be gone.

“That’s because we fly it properly.”

“You probably read the manual or something,” he said with a roll of his eyes. “Boring.”

They had indeed read the manual, but she wasn’t about to give him the satisfaction of knowing that.

“So where are we?”

“Space Glasgow,” he pronounced.

“You’re kidding me.”

“I am not.” He turned to face her, grasping both her hands. “We’ve done so much running together. I thought maybe this time we could stay still.” He searched her face for approval. “If you want. If you’d rather a proper adventure we can do that instead. Anywhere you haven’t seen yet, I’ll take you.”

She squeezed her hands. “This is perfect.”

“It really is a lovely city. I fit right it.”

He wasn’t kidding. The locals were human, for the most part, from the year 5217, and they thought the Doctor’s accent meant he could trace his ancestry to the city’s ancient predecessor so they gave him special treatment wherever he went, even though as usual he couldn’t pay. He took her to the theater, delighting her with _Sense and Sensibility_ , even though they had modernized it quite a bit. They ate until they were bursting, and spent two days playing tourist, seeing everything the city had to offer. He played his guitar on the street, and people even dropped coins at his feet, which he used to buy her flowers. On the third day he took her to a secluded spot with a beautiful view of the river. She told him of all the places she had seen, and he interrupted constantly, but she could tell that his petulance was feigned.

“You came to see me,” he said as the sun began to set. Their position mirrored theirs on Trenzalore, though the air was warmer here. “I think that was cheating.”

“A bit. But we were never much for rules.”

“Did he give you peace? You seem – less screechy.”

She shoved into him. “Oi!” she scolded. He scowled at her and she laughed, resting her head back on his shoulder. “ _You_ gave me peace, you pudding brain. I know I didn’t handle the transition well, but I know that he’s you, and you’re him.”

“He was kinder to you.”

“You were afraid.” She raised a hand to trace it across his features – his high brow and bushy eyebrows, his sharp nose and less pronounced chin. “You were so sure that loving me would bring me to ruin.”

“I was right, wasn’t I?”

“No,” she said sharply. “You made me more than I would have ever been on my own. My story – it was shorter than either of us would have liked, but it was glorious – and that’s because of you. All the wonders I have seen, all the people I have met and saved – that was all because some madman in a box showed up and showed me the stars. To have been loved by you – even just for a few years – makes me far luckier than most. I’m at peace with what’s happened. I’m ready to go back and face the raven. I can do that with a clear conscience just as long as I know that you’re going to be okay. Can you promise me that?”

He grasped her hand and raised it trembling to his lips to brush a kiss across her knuckles. “Aren’t you going to command me?”

“Not this time. I want it to be your choice.”

“Losing you will never be my choice.”

“The losing can’t be helped. But the way you react—”

“Aye,” he promised. “I shall stop raging against the dying of the light. I will learn how to live without you. But I shall never forget you, Clara Oswald.”

“You better not.” She reached into her purse and pulled out three books bound in gray, and then her tattered copy of _101 Places to See_. “I want you to have these.”

“What are they?”

“Journals, of my travels. Ashildr was always doing it. Seemed like a good idea.”

“How did they all fit inside there?” He gestured towards her small bag.

“Bigger on the inside, of course,” she said with a cheeky grin. “Timelords are annoying blokes but their technology really is clever.”

“Now who’s being rude?” he chided.

“I don’t want to be forgotten,” she confessed. “I’ve already disappeared without a trace from my former life. No one who knew me will ever understand how I died or where I went.”

“You will never be forgotten, Clara. No matter where I am or who I become, I will always remember you. That is a promise.”

“Love is a promise,” she said softly, remembering his proclamation in a graveyard full of Cybermen.

“Exactly.” She let herself appreciate his accent one last time – how the intonation that could sometimes be so gruff and harsh could also be so beautiful that it left her dazed and distracted. He was a creature of contradictions, her flawed, perfect, impossible man.

“Then promise me you will always be the Doctor. Find someone to travel with and just keep on running, and laughing, and avoiding pears.”

“I promise, Clara. Not one person will suffer.”

This kiss was soft, yet fierce. Tender, but laced with the regret of a lifetime of kisses that would never be. Because he had an abnormally large lung capacity and she did not have to breathe at all it lasted a very long time, until she heard her TARDIS land lightly behind her. She turned away without looking back, and died with the taste of him still on her lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please leave a comment but don’t hate me – there’s still two more parts, and the second half of the fix-it comes in to play next chapter, in Orpheus’s Rescue.


	2. Orpheus's Rescue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Clara asked the Doctor to let her go, but we all know he doesn't often listen. Is her fate really sealed on that Trap Street?

As Clara stepped onto the street she was less afraid of death than what she was leaving behind. She’d seen the Doctor out of control before, but he’d never been so agonized – and she’d always been there to stop him. Now she was afraid her speeches hadn’t been enough. Left alone, facing an unknown enemy, he might do terrible things in her name, and it was all because she’d thought herself clever and gotten reckless.

Maybe death did serve her right. She’d been courting this, ever since Danny, when she stopped having anything outside the TARDIS to live for. But she’d never stopped to think how the Doctor would be affected if something happened to her, not even after all the close shaves she’d had.

She was fine with dying. She wasn’t fine with ruining him.

As she watched the raven bearing down on her, the worst part was the fact she’d never know.

 _Run you clever boy, and remember,_ she pleaded in her head. _Remember to be the Doctor._

The bird seemed to fly right through her. She braced herself for pain that did not come, though her body stiffened. An agonized scream filled the air. Though it sounded like her voice she felt disconnected from the sound. She tried to move her mouth but couldn’t. Her thoughts were still clear, but her body wouldn’t respond.

It wasn’t until she collapsed backwards – numbly – that she began to panic.

Those chilling words _don’t cremate me_ ran on repeat through her mind. She’d thought that had all been part of Missy’s insane plot; that after the Timelady had been thwarted death had gone back to normal. Clara had never believed she’d actually be bound to her body – that whatever happened to it would happen to her. What would they do with her remains here on the trap street, with the Doctor being taken off to God knows where? Would Rigsby see she was taken back to London proper – to a crematorium?

She desperately wanted to hyperventilate, but she couldn’t breathe.

But then there was a voice by her ear, and a figure in a dark cloak. “Relax, Clara. You’re just in stasis. Can’t risk the natives realizing you’re not dead. I’ll put you to rights as soon as we get to the TARDIS.”

Relief flooded through her frozen body as the Doctor lifted her. He’d found a way to save her, somehow. He’d said there wasn’t a way, but he hadn’t meant it.

She wondered how he thought her unconsciousness would go unnoticed once they were back in the normal part of London but instead he slipped into a side alley that was still part of the refugee camp.

This wasn’t where he’d been parked.

Wasn’t Me going to send him someplace, she wondered. Clara needed answers before he left, so she could follow. What happened to her here had just been collateral damage – someone was after the Doctor and that couldn’t be good.

The TARDIS hummed a particularly warm welcome as the Doctor stepped inside, as if Clara was a prodigal son welcomed home, which was odd because the machine had never liked her much and she’d been here less than an hour ago.

The Doctor lowered her gently to the console room floor and pulled a sonic screwdriver from the pocket of his cloak.

He hadn’t had a sonic screwdriver for months. This one didn’t even look familiar as it whirred in front of her body, but her muscles began to loosen and she could finally take a breath.

It caught in her throat, and suddenly she was choking, the delayed hyperventilation hitting her in full force.

“Breathe, Clara,” the Doctor commanded, his hands suddenly on her cheeks as he directed her gaze to meet his. “You’re okay now. Your lungs are just restarting. Look at me and just breathe.”

If she focused on his voice she could do just that. The pounding of her heart stopped hurting and her lungs began to cooperate. But when she looked into his eyes they blazed with eons of pain and loss.

She reached up and pushed back his hood. “Your eyes. They’re so old,” she said, realizations coming quicker now.

He let go of her head but one hand drifted downward to clamp around her wrist. His wizened face erupted into a massive grin, and it was beautiful and terrible all at once. “You have a pulse again! I’ve done it. I’ve really done it.” Then he threw his arms around her and she knew that something was very wrong. This version of him never initiated hugs.

She pulled away and this time she was searching his wrists for a teleport bracelet that she couldn’t find. “Doctor, what have you done?”

“He may have perpetrated the creation of his people’s greatest enemy. Or perhaps he just saved a friend. It’s all a bit murky.” Clara started at the voice deep within the TARDIS. Ashildr was there, but she wasn’t wearing her Mayor Me outfit and there were no black swirls around her throat. Her hair was long and loose, her clothes more fitted and fashionable, and a jewel sparkled at her nose.

“You’ve changed,” Clara said.

“So have you.” There was something odd about Ashildr’s voice as well. It was almost teasing, as if she was a friend and not the woman who’d nearly just condemned her to death.

“Why are you in the TARDIS? Why has the Doctor let you in here? He was so angry.” A look passed between the two immortals, and Clara saw it and knew.

“You’re not him,” she accused, pushing herself back and scrambling to her feet. The world swayed a bit but she righted herself. “This is later. You’ve done something. Something that you shouldn’t have.”

He flinched but didn’t retreat. “I may have done. But it was necessary.”

Clara wheeled on Ashildr. “You sent him someplace. There was someone after him. We need to stop it.”

The girl’s face wrinkled with confusion. “That was a long, long time ago.”

“That is now! Minutes maybe, but no more. You can send me after him.”

The Doctor grasped her arm and there was something about his intensity that made her pause. “He’s beyond your help, Clara. In that original timestream at least. He must face his demons, and it will be terrible. But it’s all right. Because you’re here now, with me. That makes it all worth it in the end.”

“I’d say the universe has yet to rule on that,” the Mayor said breezily.

“No one’s asking you, Ashildr,” the Doctor snarled. “You can get out of here. You’ve done your part. Our quarrel is done. But it’s still best that you stay out of my way.”

“No one’s leaving until someone tells me what the hell is going on here!” Clara shouted, the Doctor’s agitation pealing through her like a fire alarm. “Five minutes ago I was going to die and now you’re both acting like ages have passed and I don’t know why I’m still breathing.”

“You’re still breathing because he doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. So old, and yet he doesn’t learn. Not everyone wants to live forever.” With dawning horror Clara began to comprehend the changes time had wrought in the Viking girl. “I only went along with it because I happen to know that you wouldn’t mind.”

“You can leave now. I’ll tell her everything.” The Doctor turned to her again, his fingers once more going to her wrist. “This is my fault.”

She hated when he blamed himself, even if sometimes it was warranted. “She’s the one who lured you here. And I’m the one who got reckless.”

Me cleared her throat. “I suppose you’ll still need me to plant a body.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said with a heavy sigh, looking past Clara’s shoulder.

“I’ll take care of it. Then I’ll be out of town for a while. Try not to burn down the universe when I’m not around to clean it up.” Me sashayed to the door of the TARDIS and then turned back, her head tilted toward Clara in invitation. “If you ever get tired of him give me a call. I can give you a lift.”

Clara’s head pounded. Nothing for the past ten minutes had made any sense. “I haven’t got your number.”

“I suppose you haven’t. But I have yours.” She stepped out into the street. “Ta.”

Clara rubbed at her temples. “Why is she acting like we’re best mates?”

“Because for the past five months she was your …” The Doctor trailed off, searching for a word, before settling on, “Companion.”

“Okay.” Clara tried to process that and couldn’t. “You need to start at the beginning. Start anywhere. But start telling me what’s going on because I’m feeling very, very unsettled and I don’t understand why my heartbeat sounds so loud.”

“The raven!” He spun back from her, his arms flailing a bit. “That’s the clever bit. You see, you invalidated the contract Ashildr had made with the Shade, and there was nothing she could do about it at that point. Shades are nasty buggers. Worse than lawyers. Always dotting their _i’s_ and crossing their _t’s_. They don’t like loopholes. Makes them angry. Very serious about their contracts. So if you can’t change the terms of a contract after it’s signed, what do you do?”

Somehow everything was a bit clearer when he was flapping about. He was easier to understand than Ashildr. “You make sure it’s a better contract before you sign it.”

“Exactly!” He grinned at her, and the world righted itself a little bit. “Who needs lawyers when you have a time machine? Ashildr went back with me to the day she signed the contract and she negotiated better terms. Then, we went back to the street and this version of Ashildr called it off. Old one didn’t even know it. The bit on the street was just theatrics to appease the natives. My sonic projected the raven from my memory of how it happened the first time, and then it emitted a stasis pulse to make you appear dead. Voila. Saved just in the nick of time!”

“But you’re not supposed to cross your own timeline. That’s dangerous!”

“It worked out all right. We were careful. A bit tricky making sure the original Ashildr thought she was the one signing the contract, when it was actually her future self, but we managed.”

“Why did Ashildr help you?”

“She felt guilty.”

“No she didn’t,” Clara argued. “She said it wasn’t her fault. Did you threaten her?”

“I may have a bit, but it was necessary.”

“Doctor!”

“It doesn’t matter now. No hard feelings. You’re fine, and Me gets to travel and everyone wins. Let’s go someplace! Where haven’t you been? There’s a café on Pluto. Did I ever take you?”

“The teleport bracelet. That’s what I’m missing.” She looked at the Doctor, energy bristling from every pore. He was too flighty. Sometime was still very wrong. “Where did she send you, five minutes and so many ages ago?”

“It doesn’t matter. You’re safe now.”

“It matters to me.” She reached out to catch his hand and grasped his fingers one by one. “Everything that happens to you matters to me.”

He looked down at their joined hands. “I was stuck in a place. Like a prison, but clever. It wanted me to tell it something. And I realized it was the Timelords, coming for my oldest secret. And that was good, because Timelord technology was what I needed to bring you back.”

Dread clawed up her throat, and she wasn’t even sure how she knew what came next was bad, but she would have sworn to it. “I thought you needed Ashildr, and being cleverer than lawyers?”

“I didn’t think of that yet. Because sometimes I’m so thick and the simple answer escapes me for so long. But I always come around to it in the end.”

“But before you came around to it?”

He closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them they were filled with something she rarely saw – pleading. “You’re going to be mad at me, Clara Oswald. Please don’t be mad.”

“You’re scaring me, Doctor.”

“You’ve spent too much time with Me then.”

“I haven’t spent any time with Me.”

“Yes you did. About five months, I think.”

“How is that possible?”

“The Timelords, they have this chamber that can retrieve someone from the very last moment of their timestream. I convinced them that you had information about the secret they wanted from me so they brought you back, and then I stole you and we ran off to the end of the universe.”

“Brought me back?” she whispered.

“Yes. The projection.” He shook his head. “I watched you die on that street. The Timelords good as killed you, and then they tried to break me, and I could not let that stand.”

Now she was the one feeling at her pulse. “I died? I well and truly died?”

“Yes.”

“But I’m not dead.”

“Not anymore. We fixed it.”

“But you stole me away.”

“I thought if I took you to the end of the universe I could make your pulse restart. But it didn’t work. Your death was a fixed point and the universe wouldn’t heal. So, we parted ways, and you and Ashildr took the second TARDIS that I stole from Gallifrey on a farewell tour. One hundred and one places, like that book of yours.”

Her head swam. It was like hearing a story of someone else’s life – his, because no one else’s was so ridiculous – except he kept using her name like she was the main character. “But I don’t remember any of that happening.”

“Because it didn’t happen to you. Not exactly. It was Clara, but it wasn’t this version of you. She went to face the raven in the end. She died. And it was only afterwards that I realized I could save her. You. Who never became her. Because this time there was no one to extract.”

She felt nauseous and faint, but the worst feeling was the guilt. She had caused all this, just because she’d thought herself too clever.

She’d been afraid that the refugee camp might suffer for her death. She’d never thought he could crash the whole universe. “But if my death was a fixed point, won’t the universe still fracture?”

“It shouldn’t. It was actually your ridiculous American diner TARDIS that reminded me. My death was a fixed point once, and it was all very depressing until I realized I didn’t actually need to die – I just needed to make sure everyone thought I was dead. Worked like a charm, then. So it should work again. The universe will be fine. And you’re fine. Everyone’s fine, really. I’m not even mad at Ashildr anymore, although she is rather annoying, acting all superior like she has to protect the world from me.”

“Except for the version of me that died, Ashildr’s mate. She’s not fine.”

“Well, no.”

The panic was thicker now, somehow, than it had been in the Mayor’s office.  The enormity of everything that had happened was suffocating, and somehow she’d missed it all. When he looked at her now he saw a woman who’d died – a woman who’d never even lived. Someone she’d never been.

“I need some time to think. To process all this. It’s been a really, really long day and I’m a bit overwhelmed.” She was mortified to realize that she was near tears, and she couldn’t articulate why.

“I’ll take you home,” he said softly, but then he frowned. “Scratch that. I can’t. Ashildr’s there now, planting a body. Soon they’ll all think you’re dead. And they have to keep thinking that, or the universe will be in danger.”

“So I can never see my family again?” The tears did start now, and she didn’t bother to stop them. Her clueless but well intentioned father and stupid, nosy Linda and dear old Gram, who sometimes seemed to understand things she couldn’t possibly comprehend.

“I’m sorry Clara. I’m so, so sorry. But there wasn’t another way.”

She hugged herself, clenching the sides of her shirt so tightly she could feel the strain in her knuckles. “Okay. Well. I’m just going to go to my room and cry a bit and try to make sense of these adventures I didn’t have. But thanks for the rescue, and I will be fine.”

“I can’t give you your memories back. I would if I could, but they’re gone. But I do have record of them.” He pulled three strange books from the shelf besides the console, and beneath them was her tattered copy of _101 Places to See_. He handed them to her like a peace offering. He looked so guilty, but she couldn’t figure out how to fix that right then. “You gave these to me, before the end. I think you and Ashildr wrote in your journals together as some sort of female bonding ritual. Must have worked. She seems quite fond of you now. I think that’s why she helped bring you back. She certainly isn’t fond of me.”

“Thank you.” Perhaps this Clara that never was could make sense of the story she’d just been told, because the Doctor’s words were nonsense.

He rested his hand on her shoulder for a moment, just long enough to make her look at him. “You wanted me to be proud of you. And I was. You were very, very brave. But I’d rather have you alive than brave.”

That wasn’t future/not future Clara – that was something she’d said not so long ago, trying to add some meaning to her death. And the fact that he remembered, even after all this time …

It meant something. But she didn’t know what.

Turning away from him, she fled.

* * *

She flung herself on her bed and cried, but the tears dried fast. She didn’t even know what she was mourning. She was alive, and that was more than she’d expected half an hour ago. She pulled her hair back and twisted herself up in the mirror. The chronolock was gone. She was no longer marked.

It was probably the loss of control that had shaken her. She hated not understanding what was going on, and right now she hadn’t a clue.

But she had the tools to remedy that. She picked up the first of the books the Doctor had given her and ran her finger over the grey, alien leather. She flipped open the cover and read the inscription on the title page.

_One Hundred and One Places to See Before I Die, by Clara Oswald._

It was unsettling to see words she’d never written inscribed in her tidy script. The words themselves were unsettling as well. She’d lived thinking she was going to die for about eight minutes. To know that for five months, the Doctor had said, seemed incomprehensible.

She supposed terminal patients did it all the time. But they might have hope of a cure, even if it was false.

Had she dared to hope that time might heal itself and spare her? Or had she trusted that the Doctor would save her? Perhaps that was why he had looked at her with such intensity. It had taken so long to get acclimated to this Doctor. Now his behavior seemed so shifted it was like he had gone and changed again, except his face was the same. She hated to think he was waiting for her to blame him. But something must have happened between them for her to spend her last months with Ashildr, of all people.

When she’d been about to die all she had wished for was more time with her Doctor.

As she began reading the first thing that struck her was the pain bleeding from every word, not at her impending demise but at its repercussions.

The second was how much the Doctor had left out.

Her former self has documented the entire fiasco in meticulous, linear detail, from the confession dial to the Cloister to the neural block. Clara actually dropped the book with a gasp when the Doctor revealed how long he had endured in a torture chamber for her, and she wanted to go out and shake him and then smoother him with hugs until he promised never to do something so selfless again, but she didn’t think she could face him when there was so much she didn’t know. They had probably hashed all this out before, and he hated repeats.

And then she read that she had told him she loved him in the Cloisters, and didn’t dare face him. It seemed likely that was why they had stopped traveling together. She’d resolved a long time ago that she would keep her feelings for him under wraps, even before he’d snapped that he wasn’t her boyfriend. It was easier that way. While any normal bloke would surely have noticed years ago, the Doctor was oblivious to silly human things like falling in love or changing your shirt. Most days she was certain he never suspected a thing.

The realization that her confession had come between them sat in her stomach like a stone. This was worse than mortifying. Sometimes, in a desperate moment, when they found themselves in an impossible scrape or just rescued from one, the adrenaline drowned out her common sense and she’d forget that the Doctor wasn’t human. She’d wish that he’d close whatever space there was between them and kiss her, just like in the movies, and that kiss would be a declaration of love that would sustain them through a fairytale life together. But in all her sane moments she knew that was a destructive fantasy. She wasn’t even sure if the Doctor could fall in love, but even if so he wouldn’t pick her when he had every individual of every species from all of time and space to choose from. What the Doctor needed was someone competent by his side – a carer – to keep him in line as he ran. And now she’d ruined her chance to see more than any other human could dream of by revealing her silly pudding brain feelings. Which, in typical Doctor form, he hadn’t even responded to one way or the other. But once he’d had time to process, he must have decided her emotions were a liability.

Unless he’d forgotten. The issue of the neural block loomed over her first entry. How had he remembered to rescue her at all?

She couldn’t face him until she knew that, at least.

The adventures were dull compared to how they’d come about but she dared not skip one page in case it revealed something that would explain the conclusion that was her current reality. She and Ashildr toured the universe, visiting places Clara had never been and historic events that had interested her and random planets that the TARDIS took them to. And the woman Clara had become ran and mused and never slept, becoming wilder and wiser and stranger with every page.

And then she found the Doctor in Jane Austen’s garden. Clara’s heart skipped a beat at the sight of the Doctor’s name on the page. The reveal that he had never forgotten, and his response to her appearance, made her drop the book and storm into the console room, where he was sitting in his pilot seat.

“You kissed me!” she shouted.

He looked up at her, his eyes ringed in red, impossibly old and impossibly sad. “Yes.”

She narrowed her eyes in an attempt to be immune to his pouting. “Do you have any idea how many times I wanted either of your daft faces to kiss me—”

He tilted his head as he interrupted. “Kind of. We’ve sort of had this conversation before.”

“Shut up! I am talking now.” He raised his hands in surrender. “There were so many times you could have kissed me – in celebration of not dying or saving a place or just because we were having a lovely time – and you never once did. And then you go and kiss me after we’re separated forever, and I can’t even remember it because it didn’t happen to me.”

He just stared at her for nearly a moment, and she thought maybe this would be like the Cloisters, where he had no response. But then he narrowed his eyes and said slowly, “Are you jealous of yourself?”

It just figured that now of all times he would understand her, when it took him nearly a year to understand tears. “Shut up. Maybe a bit.”

“We can do a reenactment. If you like.”

“What?” She was still trying to process how such a thing could possibly have come out of his mouth when suddenly he was there, pressing his lips against hers.

It was like holding a livewire, electricity sizzling from her forehead to her toes. She didn’t know if it was love or something alien but snogging had never felt like this. His hand came around the back of her neck and her whole world contracted to every place his body touched hers.

When she finally had to break away to breathe he followed her down, his forehead hovering above hers, so close to touching but not quite, like all their years together. But his eyes flicked noticeably to her lips, and she knew, for once, exactly how he felt.

“I think I should do that again.” His gravelly voice rumbled through her, setting her whole body on edge. He was so close she could see the universe in his eyes, and she had never thought these butterflies in her chest would know what came next. That there could ever be anything after the constant wanting.

“You better,” she quipped.

He grinned before he dipped his head. “Yes, Boss.”

And this time he lifted her up against the console so the angle between them wasn’t so sharp. It was like she was hanging from the edge of the TARDIS without a net again, except better, because he was right there with her as she soared, growling a bit as she worked a hand under his collar to spread across his shoulder.

And then the whole TARDIS shook with an angry whir, breaking them apart. Clara was in a bit of a daze as he lowered her down and then spun to place both his hands flat on the control panel. “Feeling a bit jealous, old girl?” he asked before spinning back to Clara. “It was like that. Except only once. And there was shrubbery that we were hiding behind. Because I didn’t want Jane to see us.” He patted the console again. “Now we have a different audience. I don’t think Sexy wants to be part of this,” he said conspiratorially. “We should probably go elsewhere if we’re going to continue.”

“Continue?” God, what was she doing? A few hours ago she’d been dead and now she and the Doctor were snogging like there was no tomorrow but she’d dropped the book before she got to the punchline. How could she go any further before she understood what was going on?

If he kissed her like that again she’d let him get away with anything.

Only then did he falter. “If you want to.”

She wanted to ask if she’d wanted to before. But it was be easier to find out herself than force him to explain. “Um, raincheck? That was – very illuminating – but I still have quite a few adventures to get through.” She sounded breathless in her own ears, but she hoped the Doctor didn’t notice. All she really wanted to do was kiss him again, consequences be damned, but she had to know what she was getting into. She didn’t know who he thought she was, or why this had changed between them. If she didn’t find out before she got much deeper, she might not give a damn.

“Oh. Of course.” He seemed to deflate and she looked away to lessen her guilt.

“I just need to finish the book before I can move on.”  Then she practically fled, unable to look at him, but she heard the words he whispered to her back.

“You don’t have to find me in there. I’m right here.”

* * *

He’d kissed her because he loved her. It seemed impossible, even after she finished the entry. A part of her had always hoped, and that part had been crushed half a dozen times.

Of course she’d sought confirmation on Trenzalore.

By the time she finished reading of their Christmas visit Clara realized what a fool she’d been. All that the Doctor had endured on her behalf, and she was hiding away because she was afraid of the magnitude of his feelings, when being the recipient of those feelings had been her deepest desire for so long. It didn’t matter what happened in those days that never were. What mattered was what happened today, and tomorrow, and all the countless days after that.

She had been cowardly, and now it was time to make amends.

She heard the music drift down the corridor before she even reached the console room. The Doctor was playing his guitar. She found him slumped against the wall, his sonic sunglasses serving as an amp. He didn’t acknowledge her as she entered the room, but she heard the single second that the melody faltered and knew he noticed.

Treading softly, she sat beside him, and after a moment of hesitation she settled against him so her arm pressed against his side with the barest of pressure. It was strange to worry about personal space when that definitely hadn’t been an issue the last time they’d been in this room together, but she knew he was tentative about touch and she hadn’t earned the right to press him, the way she’d acted.

There was something familiar about the melody he was playing, but she couldn’t name the composer. “It’s beautiful,” she said, hoping he would respond; that she hadn’t broken whatever was between them before it even started.

“It’s the song I hear in my head when we run, or you save someone by being very clever, or sometimes just when you smile at me.”

She stared at him, speechless for one of the first times in her life. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. And she’d thought the Doctor incapable of romance. She pressed herself against him a little harder, wishing for a moment that he wasn’t playing so she could take his hand. She wished he’d just look at her.

“It’s the song I played for you in the diner.” He did look at her then, and for a rare moment it was like she was the only being in an infinite universe – he could look out over all of time and space and see only her. “What you said then, about the song. Memories become stories become songs. You were exactly right. And for a moment I hoped you had worked out the truth.”

She felt like she’d failed him, even though she hadn’t been there at all. She’d been unable to see much of anything through her own pain. “I had no idea. You were very convincing, apparently, with the fainting and the unconsciousness. For a while I was worried you wouldn’t wake up.”

“I had to be. Because if you realized – well, it’s likely I’d be here with a different version of you, and the universe might be a very broken place.”

That was a level of awareness he hadn’t shown before. She only regretted how hard it had been earned.

He turned away from her with a sigh, strumming a few more chords. “I’m sorry that you can’t go home.”

That snapped her out of her paralysis and she reached out to touch his hand. “I am home,” she insisted fiercely.

He looked back at her so shyly, and she would have hugged him if the guitar wasn’t in the way. “Yeah?”

“God yes. This has been my home for a long time. I never told you, but I took a sabbatical a few months back. I haven’t even been teaching. Course I want to stay here. I just – freaked out a bit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“No! Don’t let me off the hook that easily. You’ve been through unspeakable things on my behalf, and I got scared and hid in my room like a little girl, and you asked me not to do that. You deserve better, and I will do my best to give you that.”

“I have seen you face Daleks and Cybermen without even blinking, Clara Oswald. What scared you?”

Lies came so easily now. And the person she’d become was far more like the Doctor than she was even now. But she needed to stop lying to him, in the hope that he could do the same.

“That I’m not the person that you see when you look at me now. That I can never be. Because that Clara, who confessed her deepest secrets in the Cloisters, and lived with the knowledge you’d forgotten her, and gentled Ashildr into more of a human knowing full well she was soon going to die – she was so brave and strong and clever, and what she wanted most was to watch out for you, and I’m just a stupid girl who threw my life away because I thought I knew what I was doing and left you to suffer the consequences.”

He set down the guitar and grasped both her hands in one fluid motion. “Clara. Oh my Clara. You want to talk to me about an identity crisis?” She smiled, though only for an instant, but he noticed and smiled back. “Those memories might be gone, and that’s my fault, but you are the same woman now as you were then, and I love the both of you, just as I loved every fractured piece of you that saved every daft face of mine.”

Her stomach was in knots again. “It’s weird to hear you say that,” she admitted. “Not bad weird, mind. It’s just … when I told you in the Cloisters, you didn’t say it back. You didn’t say anything. According to my diary.”

“I wanted to. But … Ashildr was wrong, though only barely. It’s not that I never learn. I just take a very, very long time.” He raised one of her hands to his mouth. The kiss lingered, and this was weird too, their sudden physicality. Weird but lovely.

But something was still wrong. She could read it in the slump of his shoulders, the hesitancy of his touch.

“Doctor, what happened to you in your confession dial?”

“I don’t want to talk about it.” He pulled his hands away.  “You don’t want to hear about it.”

But she wasn’t going to let that stand. She followed him as he retreated, grabbing one of his hands and holding on tight. She pushed herself up on her knees so it was easier to press her other hand to his cheek and force him to look at her. “I didn’t want to talk about Danny. And no one pressed me. So I didn’t. I just buried all the hurt inside until it festered, and soon enough I was taking unnecessary risks and getting myself killed just because I was desperate to feel anything else besides pain. Let’s not make the same mistake twice, Doctor. It took you so very long to fix the last one.”

Their eyes locked, and she didn’t back down until he looked away with a heavy breath. “It was like Sisyphus with his rock. I was stuck in this fortress, running from a bogeyman, and at first it was just a puzzle. Reveal a secret and the bogeyman would stop, for a while. I’d have 82 minutes to rest or eat or go somewhere else before he returned. I found this wall, twenty foot thick, and harder than diamond, and on the other side was the TARDIS. I realized I needed to break through. One can do anything, given time.”

“Four and a half billion years!” she couldn’t help but interject. The number had seemed impossible when she’d read it. It was no more fathomable now. “You beat through a wall for four and a half billion years? With what?”

“My bare hands.” His tone sent a shiver down her spine and she gaped at him in horror. His voice had been flat when he started, but pain was leaching through, and when he suddenly laughed it was a terrible sound. “If only it was that simple. I beat through the wall for less than 82 minutes. Then the bogeyman came and I had no more secrets I was willing to tell. His touch burned. Ruined my body. But by then I’d worked it out. I’d been there before. And I’d be there again. I had to crawl back up to the teleporter. It had a copy of me as I’d been when I arrived. All the skulls I had seen – they were mine. I had to burn up my current body to make the energy to create a new one.”

Clara gasped, the hand on his cheek raising instinctively to fist in his hair and pull him towards her. He was too lost in the story to even fight her as she clutched on, stroking her fingers across his scalp in a way she hoped was soothing. “I never remembered, when the cycle restarted, that I’d done this before. But by the end I always knew. I knew how long I had been there. And I could guess how much longer it would take. I had to make a conscious choice to beat that wall and start again.”

She hoped he was too distracted to feel her tears on his neck. She felt shaky and ill, but she couldn’t let him see. She would not add guilt onto all he had already suffered. “All that time, alone and fightin’.”

He twisted slightly so he could meet her eyes. “I wasn’t alone. You were there.”

The thought of another timeline she couldn’t remember was dizzying. “Any time I was in trouble and needed more time to think I’d retreat in my mind to the TARDIS. You’d write on the chalkboard like you did so many times. Once you even spoke to me. You told me to keep fighting and win.”

“If it was really me I would have told you to take care of yourself!”

“No you wouldn’t. You always put the world in front of my feelings. But that’s good. I need that, sometimes.”

She closed her eyes but held on tighter, dropping her chin to rest on the top of his head. “No one should suffer that long.”

“That wasn’t the worst part. I broke through that wall to save you. After I tricked the Timelords into extracting you and we escaped from the Cloisters I was so certain I could make your pulse restart. But I couldn’t. It had all been for nothing. No matter what I did you weren’t really alive. Even if you had been I was going to take your memories of me. If you weren’t so clever I would have done it. I’ve done it before. Ashildr told me I had no right to change who you were but I was about to because I thought I knew best. How can you forgive me for that?”

She imagined waking up in her bed, ordinary, without any recollection of the Doctor or the adventures he’d taken her on, not even certain why she’d quit nannying or gotten so clever with computers. It would be awful to lose who she’d become, not just the memories but the progress. Back before the Doctor she’d put everything off, wasting her life. Now she knew the value of each moment.

It had also been awful to think she’d been the one to cause the Doctor to lose his memories. It had been necessary, and it had been a lie, and she’d felt guilty and angry and heartbroken.

But the neural block hadn’t worked. It was a waste to dwell on what might have been.

She looked down and found one of the hands he had broken so many times for her, and she linked their fingers together. Never before had he needed her care quite this desperately, and though the pressure was enormous she would withstand anything for him. “Because we’re a team. That’s what teammates do. One stands up when the other falls down. I was clever, so we both remember, and it’s okay.”

He flexed his fingers against hers, as if he meant to pull away and hadn’t the strength. “Can forgiveness really be earned so easily?”

“When it’s really important, yeah. Do you forgive me for taking Rigsby’s mark without telling you and causing all this?”

“I was never angry at you for that.”

She squeezed his hand, the relief permeating through her. “Then we’re square.”

He straightened from his position practically slumped in her lap, leaning back against the TARDIS. She mourned the lack of contact, although he did not let go of her hand.

“I’ve been thinking a lot about the hybrid. Whether it was me, or us, or the other Me. Or something else entirely.”

She leaned towards him. “Have you worked it out yet?”

“Those of us who think we know better – so often we bring about the thing we fear most by trying to prevent it. It’s called the Destiny Trap. Trying to avoid creating the hybrid might do just that. So it’s best not to dwell. There’s a chance Gallifrey is doomed no matter what anyone does. This might not even be about me at all. I suppose not everything is.”

“Imagine that,” she teased gently.

But his intensity didn’t soften. “I think Ashildr might have been wrong about the two of us. Because I’m not a danger to Gallifrey when you’re there to stop me. It’s losing you I can’t abide. So you have to be more careful! Humans are so breakable.” He reached out to stroke her cheek as if it were porcelain, and she’d never known him to be so gentle.

“I will. I got careless, and that’s my fault and I’m sorry. No more unnecessary risks. But you will lose me some day.”

She watched his eyebrows peak. “Don’t say that! Never say that!”

“But it’s true. Even if I’m careful and live eighty more years, my life will be far shorter than yours. You’ll have to accept that, if we’re going to keep traveling together. I can’t live my life fearing what you’ll do if something happens to me. People like us, we should say things to one another. That’s my condition. We’ve both hurt each other so much by telling lies and keeping secrets. I’ll stay. But we need to be honest with each other, even if we lie to the rest of the world. Can you do that?”

“We should say things to one another,” he muttered. “You didn’t write that in your diary.”

“No,” she answered. “I just said it now.”

“But you said it before. In the Cloisters.”

“Okay.” There was a spark in his eye and she wasn’t sure why. “That’s important because … ”

“Means time _is_ healing,” he said excitedly.

“That’s good. But don’t think I’ve forgotten that you haven’t answered my question.”

“If honesty is what it takes to keep you at my side, then of course I shall do my best. But in the spirit of honesty, it’s likely that you will have to forgive me quite a few times. Old habits are hard to break, and some of mine are very old indeed.”

There was life in his voice again, a bit of the manic whimsy she secretly adored, and it felt like the storm had passed. He would not send her away again, and she had no intention of going.

“If we’re being honest now then I suppose I already have a confession. Especially if we’re going to be so… ” He looked deliberately at his hand that was still on her face, and then he slowly drug his fingertips across her cheek and pushed her hair behind her ear. She tried not to bite her lip and hoped he didn’t notice the way his actions made her heart pound. “… touchy.”

“Is there a problem with the … touching?” Gods she hoped not, but she supposed she’d have to live with it, at least until she could acclimate him properly. He’d seemed to take to the kissing quickly enough.

“No! But there might have been less of one. Except I, being somewhat of an idiot –”

“You’re rambling and I’m not following. What have you done?”

He sighed. “Actually it might also have been a bit your fault. You came to see me, on Trenzalore, and we were all truthful but you were so sad and I had done that. So when I realized that I could change again, and it was that future me that was going to hurt you, I.” He ran a hand through his hair and started again. “Regeneration’s a lottery, really. Never know what you’re going to get. But sometimes if you want something deeply enough you can influence it slightly.”

“Still not following. What did you want?”

His eyebrows were really putting on a show. “It’s more what I didn’t want.”

“Okay…”

“I thought it would be easier for you if you weren’t attracted to my next form,” he blurted. “So that may be why I became this.” He waved his arm from his head to his torso. “Instead of someone a bit more like my former self, who I do maintain had too much hair and very questionable choice in accessories.”

“Are you saying you made yourself look older _to repel me_?” she asked.

He seemed to have trouble meeting her eyes. “I may have done.”

She laughed, more out of shock then anything, and when he looked affronted she quieted, being sure to smile as she studied every inch of him, from the silvery hair which she now knew was surprisingly soft, to the impressive eyebrows that helped tell her what he was thinking, and every wrinkle that conveyed all the losses he had endured, and all the straight clean lines hid by a wardrobe that might have been more understated than his former self, but was occasionally given to the same fancy. His glasses and guitar were not so different than his bowties and fezzes – he just chose not to wear them all the time. They were for when he let his guard down. She liked to think they were for her, but maybe that was just vanity.

Although, if he had been thinking about her while he was changing …

“First off, I’m strangely flattered although that’s very twisted logic, and once again you were trying to change my life without my consent which is not going to fly anymore. And secondly. You better listen up because I may not say this again, although I’m almost certainly going to be thinkin’ it.” She wanted to look away, but as his carer she just couldn’t. She’d never imagined her Doctor would need his ego stroked. Now she could feel her cheeks flaming. It was easier when they didn’t talk about these things. “I don’t really mind the age thing. Think you’re a bit of a silver fox, actually.”

She didn’t think the Doctor even noticed the way his chest puffed up. “You don’t mind?”

“I really don’t. But we’re going to stop talking about this now.”

“You seemed to mind at first, at Vastra’s place.”

“It was a shock, yeah. I was worried. I thought everything at Trenzalore had made you feel old, not just look old. But it was mostly your attitude I minded. You were quite rude to me!”

“Regenerations are a bit dodgy at the beginning. I’m always disappointing people until I get a handle on it. But that might also have been the second part of my plan.”

“To distance yourself with your face and your behavior.”

At least the daft man had the grace to look sheepish. “Have I mentioned before that I can be an idiot?”

“Fortunately you have.” She shook her head at him. “That almost worked too well, you know.”

“I do. And I’m sorry. I was very relieved every time you chose to stay with me, even if I didn’t show it.”

She hated to think that she might have abandoned him when he was trying to protect her – but she’d come close, more than once. They’d obviously needed an honesty pact a long time ago. “Anything else I need to know?”

“Just one thing more. When I said I wasn’t a hugging person—”

“That was a lie too, then, to keep me at a distance?”

He shook his head. “That was a rule I made for myself. Because I was afraid, if I started holding on, I might never be able to let go.”

She grinned at him. Perhaps this honesty thing wasn’t so bad after all. “So you really don’t mind if I touch you?”

“Clara Oswald, I the opposite of mind.” Something about his tone set the butterflies off in her stomach again, and her skin tingled with anticipation.

“That’s good then. Because as you know I am very fond of hugs. And other things.” She smirked at him, and while his ears did go a bit pink he smirked right back. His sudden boldness made her want to tackle him, but she restrained herself, instead curling back into his side, her head resting on his shoulder.

She hummed in contentment when his arm came around her, holding her there.

“I need to finish the last journal,” she told him, sensing how easily his presence might lure her to sleep.

“You really don’t.”

“You can’t just put down a good book before you reach the end.”

“You really can. I do it all the time.” To strengthen his argument he pressed a kiss to her forehead.

That did get her off track, but only for a few blissful moments. “She wanted to be remembered. I owe her that.”

“All right,” he conceded, his disappointment evident.

She reached to her side and grabbed the gray book. “But since I brought it with me, I thought maybe you wouldn’t mind the company?”

He visibly brightened, and she was struck by his evident need for her, which for so long he’d hidden away.

“Please stay,” he said, simple and sincere.

“Always.” And then she shook her head, internally rolling her eyes at herself at how sappy she sounded. “Though please don’t just sit here and watch me read. You can go back to playing.”

She moved enough for him to pick his guitar back up and get situated, but then she aligned their legs, her right against his left. He began by playing her song, and that left her distracted until he transitioned into Beethoven, and she read as fast as she could, as she and Me saved people and played tourist throughout time and space. But as Clara turned the last page it was like the Doctor was the author, because there was no ending.

“It isn’t finished!” she exclaimed. “She wrote down the coordinates you gave her and then she just stopped.”

The Doctor stopped mid-chorus in his latest Queen song. “You told Ashildr to pick you up if you were gone three days without calling, which she did. You must have gone straight to Gallifrey.”

“All this reading, just to get to our final adventure, and now I’ll never even know!”

He smiled at her fondly, with just a touch of condescension. “You could ask the man who took you. Just a thought.”

“All right, I’ll bite,” she answered, not admitting she’d gotten so wrapped up in the story that she’d forgotten that was a possibility. “Where did the coordinates lead?”

“Space Glasgow.”

She bumped his shoulder with hers. “You’re having me on.”

“I am not.”

“And what did we do in Space Glasgow? Save the princess from an arranged marriage to the three headed king of Space Cardiff?”

“No. We went to the theater. And the botanical gardens. And the museum. Had a few nice meals. It was lovely.”

Truth be told it was nice to hear the story in his brogue, even if he was sparse on the details. He could make anything sound a bit like a fairytale. “You mean you took me on three days worth of actual, proper dates and I don’t even remember them?”

“You didn’t seem to find the robot zombies in Sense and Sensibility proper, according to contemporary Earth standards.”

She rolled her eyes. “Did you actually pay for our food?”

“Of course not. Though you didn’t have to either. They were very fond of me there. I was kind of a local celebrity before the end of the trip.”

“Let me guess. You’d saved that princess a few years earlier.”

“Actually it was the accent.”

“The accent?”

“Yeah. They thought I belonged there. You found that very amusing.”

She still did. She pressed him for more details, and he told her of songs in the park, and walks around the water, and the way he had watched her instead of the sunrise and wished for a miracle.

They’d been holding hands, and he pulled hers up to his lips. “It was beautiful, and it was sad. For the first time I realized that things could be both.”

He had grown, and matured, and aged, and yet he was still the same dear man who had chosen to try to save Rigsby, and spent hundreds of years defending a town called Christmas even knowing he was destined to die there, and showed up on her doorstep in a monk’s habit repeating her name.

“You were at peace, at the end. And I promised that I would let you go, and no one would suffer for your death. One out of two’s not bad, right?”

She shook her head. “I’m sure I meant that, at the time. But I’m glad you didn’t give up on me.”

“Never,” he swore.

“One day you must.”

“We’ll see.” She let him have that, because she didn’t want to argue, or think about that day. She’d run with him for a good long while, and sometime in there she’d figure out a way to prepare him for the day that she couldn’t.

“Was there kissing?” she asked, because she was only human after all, and his proximity was wearing on her self-restraint.

“A bit.” Their lips met halfway, before she could even think about asking permission, and this kiss was a slow burn that flooded her mind so completely that when they finally broke apart she had no idea how she had ended up in his lap.

“You know the last time we did this you didn’t have to breathe, and that was quite helpful.”

“Hush!” She kept her forehead pressed against his, loving the way he seemed as dazed as she felt. “Was there more than kissing?” she asked tentatively.

He licked his lips. “No. It wasn’t that beautiful. Or that sad.”

It was slightly awkward talking to him about this. For so long she’d tried to think of him as a best mate, certain her feelings would never be reciprocated, not even sure that they could be. Now their whole dynamic had shifted. Fantastic as it was, it would take some getting used to.

“And what about now?” she whispered. “Will there be more than kissing?"

The way he gazed down at her with such adoration was answer enough. But still he told her, “Whatever you wish, Boss.”

She most certainly wished. But the wounds were still too fresh, and her body was stiff from all the hours spent on the TARDIS floor. It would be better when they were both not so raw. There was no need to        rush any longer.

She smiled back at him. “We’re so gonna get there. But what I want right now is something to eat, and then a good night’s rest. And then we should go somewhere. Anywhere. Your choice.”

“Another date?” he asked, pulling her to her feet with a grace that belied his age – apparent or actual.

“If you insist,” she said cheekily. “But for it to be a proper date you really have to pay. Didn’t Kate say you’re on UNIT’s payroll? That means your salary has to go somewhere. Get a bank card. Seeing as I am no longer employed, I can’t keep paying for all our meals.”

“I’ll get to work on that while you’re sleeping. In the meantime –” He approached the console and made some adjustments. “Coffee or chips?”

“Chips, definitely. Last thing I need right now is caffeine.”

He grinned at her as he set the coordinates. And as the TARDIS landed on a familiar street in Glasgow, Clara stepped out into the land of the living.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Whew! Sorry for the delay. That got much longer and angstier than I anticipated, but I hope it was worth the wait. 
> 
> Fair warning – the last part, “Elysian Fields,” is likely to be even longer and almost entirely fluff. But it will deal with a particularly pesky plot hole in Listen that has bothered me for quite a while.
> 
> Please let me know what you thought. Detailed reviews make my day!


	3. Elysian Fields - Part 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The more than kissing comes a few weeks later ... "
> 
> Clara and the Doctor adjust to the changes in their relationship.

The more than kissing comes a few weeks later, after they return from saving a Silurian orphanage from a tidal wave. He glances back to find her framed by the light of the double red suns streaming through the door of the TARDIS, every inch of her radiant. She throws her head back in laughter as she twirls around the console and he is overcome.

“Where to next?” she asks, delightfully breathless, a flush rising in her pale round cheeks.

For the first time he can recall he has absolutely no interest in leaving the TARDIS.

“Remember the time I said I wasn’t your boyfriend?”

Her grin falters. “Like crystal. Wasn’t a high point, honestly.”

“Forget I said that. Forget I ever said that,” he crows as he advances on her, his smile so wide his cheeks hurt. “Because I’m about to do something you should only let your boyfriend do.” Her eyes widen as he scoops her into his arms, but she laughs into his neck as he carries her deep into the heart of the TARDIS.

* * *

Afterwards Clara lays nestled between his hearts, feeling safe and sated and strangely contemplative. Being _loved_ by a Timelord is quite a bit like being loved by a Timelord – exhilarating and intense and just slightly unfamiliar.

The after is certainly lovely, his chest cool against her cheek as he lazily strokes a hand through her hair. As much as he boasts about his superior biology he seems just as drowsy as any human bloke.

But she is wide awake, her mind racing like she’s had ten cups of coffee. She tries to focus on the steady rhythm of his heartbeats and the softness of his skin against hers, but a question nags at the back of her mind and she blurts it out against her better judgement.

“How many other girls from your snog box ended up here?”

“None,” he answers automatically, but then he opens one eye. “Well, River,” he amends. “Though we never traveled together properly.”

She thinks of River Song – fierce, gorgeous, her hair and her history both larger than life, her timeline fundamentally entwined with the Doctor’s.  “Was she the one you loved and lost?”

“No.” The Doctor’s hand stills, and she thinks she’ll have to press him. But then he chuckles coldly and presses a kiss to the top of her head. “That would make sense, wouldn’t it? A man should be in love with his wife.”

She could certainly argue that they’d visited dozens of planets where that wasn’t the case, but she doesn’t interrupt, just reaches out to interlock her hand with his. She isn’t sure what she hoped to gain by opening this can of worms, besides an inferiority complex. But he speaks so rarely of his past, and she wants to understand everything that had made him into the man he has become.

It’s bound to do him good, as well. Holding everything in for thousands of years can’t be healthy. If she can help him navigate through centuries of emotions she’ll tamp down any jealousy that comes with it.

“I shaped River’s entire life. My ship made her into a Timelord. She was taken from her parents to be turned into an assassin to kill me. She spent years in prison for my apparent murder.  Yet somehow she changed all that hate and abandonment into love – for me, the man who ruined her chance of ever having a normal life. And she was magnificent, and fearless, and so many admirable things, and I knew that she deserved for me to return that love. So I married her, and stole her away from her prison and showed her the stars, and I hoped that I would start to feel for her what she felt for me.”

He sounds so guilty, and it’s not jealousy she feels – it’s understanding. Because his details are surely unique but the situation’s not, and she’s browbeat herself for this one before.

She pulls back enough to look him in the face. “You can’t force yourself to love someone if the feelings aren’t there. You can go through the motions, pretend even, but you can’t make it real.”

His eyebrows have migrated close together in concentration. “Every time I looked at her I saw her die for me in that Library, or the devastation on Amy’s face after they took her away. And each time I failed her all over again, because I’m certain that she knew.”

He closes his eyes in shame and she reaches up to stroke a hand through his hair. She wants to grant him absolution, but it’s not her he’s wronged. She doesn’t know what River thought of him, if she blamed him for his coldness.

Clara had blamed him for his coldness once. Before she’d understood it had been difficult to bear.

She knows better now, how the levels of protection he builds around his hearts can be cold and cruel and alien, but he erects them with the best of intentions.

It’s shared understanding that she can offer him now.

“I told Danny I’d never tell another man ‘I love you.’”

She feels his body go rigid at the name of the man he’d always so clearly disdained. It’s so obvious now that he had been jealous, but at the time she’d gone half out of her mind trying to discern what it was about her boyfriend that had turned the Doctor into a petulant child.

After an awkward moment he clears his throat. “I’m not technically a man, if that helps.”

He clearly doesn’t understand, but the fact he’s trying to be sympathetic warms her straight through and suggests that a relationship with him won’t always have to be an uphill battle. “No. I don’t want to be let off the hook for this. I told Danny that and I wanted to mean it. If he lived I would have kept that promise. But when I said the words to him they didn’t mean the same as when I say them to you. So I never should have said them at all.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

She stifles the urge to roll her eyes. It was too much to hope he would suddenly become astute in human emotions. “Because Danny is my River. Except I didn’t have to pretend to love him. I chose to, because I was lonely and tired of pining after you, and I thought he would be the way I could move on.”

There is something cathartic in the telling of one of her deepest secrets. She has never breathed a word of this to another soul, but she has spent long nights ruminating on this very topic. It was those long nights she’d tried to avoid with her insistence on constant adventures, because when they were running there was no time for regret.

“Danny and I would have had a fine life together. We might even have been happy. But it would have been so _ordinary_. And if I’d never met you maybe that would have been fine with me. But by the time I met Danny that wouldn’t have been enough. But instead of doing the right thing and cutting his loose, I lied to him about you, and I lied to you about him, and I planned to give up what I really wanted for the path that seemed easier. I was cowardly, and I’m sorry.”

She can’t interpret the way he’s looking at her, but she resists the urge to turn away in shame. She made him promise no more hiding what’s important, and she knows she must lead by example.

“You didn’t love Danny?” he finally asks, slowly, as if that’s incomprehensible when actually she’d felt like she’d done a rubbish job convincing anyone that she did.

“No. I cared for him, but it wasn’t love.”

“But you got so – agitated – after he died. You tried to throw all the TARDIS keys into a volcano!”

That had been one of her biggest mistakes, and she’d always remember the moment he’d told her to go to hell and she was certain she’d ruined everything good left in her life.

Instead he’d told her he cared so much for her that her betrayal didn’t matter, and for the first time since he’d regenerated she realized the man she loved was still in there, he’d just forgotten how to express himself.

“That was guilt,” she admitted. “And rage at the universe, because it wasn’t fair. He was a good man, and he loved me, and I was already wronging him by using him as a distraction instead of loving him the way he deserved. Then he was just gone, so senselessly.” It brings tears to her eyes, even now. “It was worse when I found out that Missy killed him just to set me off. He shouldn’t have been a part of any of this, and it’s my fault that he was.”

“You’re leaking.” The Doctor reaches out clumsily and brushes the tears away. “You’re not supposed to be leaking now. Crying, sorry. Clearly I’m rubbish at this. I’m supposed to be making you happy. Tell me how to fix it, Clara.”

He is wide eyed and frantic, the caretaker confused by the nuance of human emotion, and she pulls his face to hers and kisses him softly, drawing a moan from him as she strokes her thumbs across his cheekbones and buries her fingers in his hair.

“It’s all right,” she whispers, for a moment keeping their foreheads pressed together. “Five minutes a day to mourn him; I promised him that too.”

“Five minutes is too long to be sad.”

“Sometimes that can’t be helped.” She brushes her nose against his and then pulls back slightly. “But it’s what we do with all the other minutes that matter.”

He licks his lips as he examines her, and the action sends a shiver through her. “So you’re not … “ He drops his voice into a whisper. “Upset about the sex?”

She laughs so hard she has to roll away a bit. He looks so serious and concerned as he waits for her to gather her wits enough to respond. “Most definitely not. No complaints there.”

“Thank God. I thought I did it wrong. I am quite out of practice.”

“We can work on the practice bit, but you’ve certainly got the moves.”

His grin falters, just for a second, and his eyes go far away.

“Tell me about her. The girl you loved who wasn’t River.”

His attention snaps back to her. “I’m no expert in human pillow talk, but even I know this seems like a dodgy subject.”

She props herself up on one elbow. “We’re supposed to tell each other things, remember. I want to know about the people and experiences that were important to you. All the years you’ve lived, of course there have been others you’ve loved. They’ll be others long after I’m gone. I have to accept that, if this is ever going to work.” Her eyes rake over him, bare to the sheet draped loosely across his waist. “Besides, I’m in a particularly good mood and you are in a fine position to make it up to me,” she teases.

He lays back against the pillows, his hands propped behind his head. “Her name was Rose. Rose Tyler.” His voice softens, taking on a fondness Clara has only heard him use with her. Jealously sparks, but curiosity is stronger.

“Which of you met her?”

“My ninth self that called myself the Doctor – the one after the me I never spoke of. The Timewar had just ended, and Gallifrey was gone by my own hand, and I was so angry. I was determined to see the whole universe on my own, to prove that I could save it, even if it didn’t deserve saving. And then I met a pink and yellow English girl in a shop and told her to run – and by the time we’d saved the day I realized I wanted her to come with me.”

“As simple as that?”

“It was hardly simple. She turned me down.”

Clara remembers well the feeling of a madman in a box dropping into her life and promising her incomprehensible wonders if only she ran away with him. “The good ones always play hard to get.”

“That they do. I left her there, went on my way. But suddenly saving the day no longer felt satisfying without anyone to be impressed, and even the anger seemed a bit hollow. My hand itched for hers to hold it. Drove me a bit mad. So I went back to seconds after I left. Told her my girl was a time machine. Did the trick.”

“That actually worked?”

The Doctor smiles. “Rose was younger than you. Just barely out of school. Her mum was always slapping me. Me. A Timelord more than twenty times her age!”

“Very domestic.”

“Sometimes it was.” He sighs, and Clara can hear the weariness entwined with the fondness. “She saved me. Made me enjoy life again. Made me care, about the places I saved and the people I’d grown to think were below me. I wanted to be better, so I’d be deserving of her affection. And sometimes she actually saved me. She broke into the heart of the TARDIS once and swallowed the time vortex to save me from Daleks. Nearly killed her. I had to regenerate to save her.”

“How’d she take that?” Clara remembers that feeling too – the man she loved suddenly replaced by someone who insisted he was the same but so obviously was not.

“Not well. I told you I have a habit of failing people right after I regenerate. Though back then – I was so young. She was always picking up these pretty boy strays. So as I was changing – I wanted to be attractive to her. But at first all she wanted was her old Doctor back.”

“Which Doctor did you change into?”

“You met him, that time there were three of us. Chucks and pinstripes and sideburns.”

She smirks in appreciation. “Ah, yes. That was pretty fine work.”

“Clara!”

She laughs at the way he seems scandalized, because after all they’ve been through, all the wrong turns they made, here she is, wrapped in his TARDIS blue sheets. “Oh hush. I fell for you when you insisted on wearing a bow tie everywhere. Obviously I’ve lost all perspective when it comes to you.”

“Quite right too.” He wrinkles his nose. “That was something _he_ said.”

“What happened to Rose?” she prompts.

“We got separated. She fell into a parallel world. Her family was there – she wasn’t alone – but I couldn’t reach her. I burned up a sun to say goodbye. And I wanted to tell her – I was going to tell her – but I couldn’t. Love – it doesn’t come easy to Timelords. We’re taught not to feel it. Not to give in. Certainly not to voice it aloud if we fall prey to such shameful weakness.”

“Love isn’t weakness,” she says fiercely. “The Timelords were wrong.”

“The Timelords were scared.” He reaches out to her, pushing the hair behind her ear, his cool hand lingering on her face before his fingers drift downwards, skimming down her arm until they link with hers, bringing them slowly to his mouth so he can press a kiss to the back of her hand, while all the while she watches him, barely daring to breathe, her whole body attuned to his proximity and his gentle movements. She wonders how it was possible to ever doubt that he loved her, to think him incapable of such. “All their talk of superior biology, working so hard to create technology to separate reproduction from the base hormones they warned against. It’s fear talking, the sound of the cloister bells ringing their destruction.”

“How is that?” she breathes.

He kisses her hand again, his cool lips setting her skin on fire. “All the songs and stories humans write about love. They’d give anything to sustain it, the universe be damned, but death separates everyone in the end, and there’s nothing they can do. But Timelords –” He raises his eyes and she knows what he’s about to say, because she’s seen this look before. “—we can tear the universe apart to keep our beloved by our side. Death need not hold sway, when you have a time machine and are willing to break the rules.”

The intensity in his gaze makes her shiver. She will stop him, she will always stop him, and yet … she is only here with him now because of the rules he broke for her, and she does not regret it. Cannot even bring herself to try.

She swallows, and closes her eyes to break the connection. “So you make the rule before anyone wants to break it. But isn’t that just another Destiny Trap?”

“Perhaps.” As his assent rumbles through her she resigns herself to the fact that the path of the hybrid might be unavoidable. There’s no going back, now.

“So Rose is stuck in another world somewhere, missing you?” It’s time to change the subject. The Timelords are pretentious monsters, and she’s done letting them control her or the Doctor.

“Not exactly. She found her way back to me. Invented a dimension canon and blasted her way through until she found the right universe. And for the span of one adventure I let myself consider the life we could have had together.”

She knows, suddenly, what happened to Rose Tyler, with the same certainty of loss she felt as the TARDIS left her standing in her lot with a perfectly cooked turkey. “You sent her away again.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because otherwise you would have buried her, long ago.” She thinks of his Eleventh self as she says it, that same weary resignation. He may have ignored the Timelords’ ban on love, but he’s still brainwashed enough not to think anything good can come of it.

“Yes. That was nearly fifteen hundred years ago, not counting all the time in the confession dial. But that wasn’t why I did it. It’s a long story, but there was an extra hand, and some spare regeneration energy. It became a second version of me, half human, one heart and a mortal lifespan. I knew he could have the life I never could. Rose could have that life. The one she surely wanted, even if she wouldn’t say so. He could tell her that he loved her, and he did. So I sent them both back to Pete’s World. I was so sure at the time it was the right choice. But now I think perhaps I did her a great injustice, not letting her choose.”

It’s so selfless, in his well-meaning, oblivious, steam-rolling sort of way, and she aches for him and the loss he voluntarily suffered. She also aches for the girl he left behind, feels an echo of the frustration, the despair. “I’m sure she’s forgiven you.” She tightens her fingers against his.

“How can you know that?” he whispers.

“Because I did. It’s what you do, when you love somebody. Forgive them for being an idiot.”

“Thank you.” It’s barely a breath, but it’s filled with so much meaning. She can almost see the burden expelled with his exhale.

Her adrenaline is fading, his pillows growing increasingly comfortable. She is grateful to this Rose Tyler, for helping him when he needed it, and reminding him the joy of having a hand to hold. She hopes Rose would have approved of her taking up the task. What she wants right now is to fall asleep beside him, and for him to experience what it’s like for them to wake up like this together. She rolls back against his chest, and his arms encircle her, holding her there.

“Now someone’s tired,” he says, amused.

“Hmmm,” she answers, and he chuckles and presses a kiss to her forehead.

“Sweet dreams, Clara.”

The way he says her name is sweeter than any dream could possibly be. “I worked it out,” she says sleepily right before rest can claim her. “The connection between me and Rose. You’ve got a white knight complex. Except you’re the damsel in distress.”

She expects him to argue. At the very least claim not to know what she’s on about. But he laughs, his breath stirring her hair.

“You are very good at saving me.”

* * *

She insists on telling Rigsy she’s alive.

“It’s too dangerous. You could fracture time,” he argues, and it’s rare for him to be the practical one.

She’s not having it today, though. “Are you honestly saying you never told any of your friends you weren’t dead?”

“That’s different,” he sputters.

“How?” she counters, hands on her hips.

“River told them,” he eventually concedes.

She wins the argument.

They park outside Rigsy’s flat at dawn and wait for him to emerge. She leans against the side of the TARDIS, taking in the sleepy London street. They haven’t been back here since her death. They’ve stayed far from Earth altogether.

She hadn’t expected the morning to be quite this chilly. When the Doctor notices her shiver he shrugs out of his coat and hands it to her. The velvet is soft against her skin, the sleeves are entirely too long and she’s sure she looks ridiculous.

It warms her from the inside even before she notices how it cuts off the chill.

“Aren’t you going to say anything about how those with weak constitutions should dress appropriately for Earth’s volatile weather?”

“Not today.” His hand is resting at the small of her back, in some strange new gesture that seems protective in nature. She likes it, even if she isn’t sure that either of them could enunciate exactly what he’s protecting her from.

Rigsy emerges twenty minutes later, breaking them from their companionable silence.

The Doctor steps out of the shadows first. “Local Knowledge,” he booms, and their friend jumps. But his face changes quickly from startled to sad, and Clara is glad that she demanded they come.

“Doctor.”

The word hangs, mournful, and Clara thinks of her family and can’t take it. She steps out from behind him, her hands up in a placating manner. “It’s all right,” she says as Rigsy begins to freak out. “We just came to tell you it’s all right.”

He shakes his head. “You’re dead. I saw it. I _caused_ it.”

“It’s a long story. Basically I’m tougher than I look and he’s very, very stubborn.” She takes a step towards him, but they’re not close enough for hugs and a handshake hardly encompasses everything that has passed between them. “I told you not to blame yourself,” she scolds.

“Hasn’t blamed himself too much. There’s a second new human now, isn’t there?”

Rigsy twists the circle on his ring finger. “Yeah. Jen and I got married too. Seemed best not to put anything off.”

“Good.” Deciding the hell with propriety she flings her arms around him, and he returns the shaky embrace. For a moment she lets herself pretend it’s her father, Gran, another teacher at the school.

When she pulls away she brushes a tear from her eye. “The world has to think that I’m dead, but I wanted you to know otherwise.”

“We named the baby Clara.”

It guts her, but it’s a heady kind of pain that steals her breath yet soothes the hurt it causes. The Clara that never was, the one that died for this man – she had just wanted to be remembered. A new life born from her sacrifice was the best memorial of all.

“You could meet her,” Rigsy offers.

She thinks of the way the Doctor looked at Lucy, and the conversation she knows they need to have that she’s been putting off. It wouldn’t be fair. Knowing that this Clara exists is enough.

She shakes her head. “We best be going. Places to see. People to save.”

He watches her closely with his artist’s eye. “This is goodbye for real, isn’t it?”

She pulls the Doctor’s coat a little more tightly around herself. “Probably. Although, life we lead, you never know.”

“I can never thank you properly.”

But this meeting, this moment, it makes everything that comes after a little less hard to swallow. “Knowing that you have a life and a family – that’s more than enough.”

She hugs him once more for good measure, and he pulls out his phone and shows her the bundle of dark skin and bright curls that will carry her legacy. The Doctor stands at her back, his hand on her once more.

“The graffiti you drew on my TARDIS,” he says. Clara expects his voice to be stern but it isn’t. Rigsy stiffens anyway, bracing himself for the onslaught.

“The memorial for Clara.” The Doctor clears his throat. “It was very beautiful. It peeled away to dust the moment we entered the time vortex, of course. But I shall always remember it up here.” He taps his forehead twice and Rigsy smiles.

“Take care of her,” Rigsy calls as they walk off hand in hand.

Clara turns back once they reach the TARDIS door. “We’ll take care of each other.”

* * *

Sometimes she dreams of things she never lived – of saving a Doctor with faces she never saw or crossing places off her bucket list with Ashildr by her side.

“Why am I seeing all these memories that aren’t mine?” she asks one night.

“Your timestreams may be converging. Possibly because of your increased close physical proximity to a Timelord.” He spreads his hand across her bare stomach as if to prove his point, his breath warm against her ear.

She calls his bluff. “You have absolutely no idea, do you?”

“No. Sounds impressive though, doesn’t it?” She can hear the drowsiness in his voice, and she sinks into his embrace.

In her arms her Doctor sleeps, strange and astonishing like the eighth wonder of the world. The first time he curled up behind her after their lovemaking she expected him to be gone when she woke, off tinkering with his machine and muttering about humans’ silly need to waste eight hours each and every day. Instead he was there, watching her with besotted eyes that quickly led to another go. Even more shocking was the first time their goodnight kiss was chaste and he still climbed into bed beside her. At first she thought it was for her benefit, him pretending to be a little more human so she wouldn’t have to sleep alone. She comes to realize he’s the one who needs it more. All the lines disappear from his face when he’s asleep by her side, and in his younger seeming self she can see shades of the Doctor he used to be, less haunted and more hopeful. She is pleased that she can grant him that momentary peace, even if the shadows return when he wakes.

One night she wakes in a cold sweat, and she is glad when his arms find her shoulders, shaking her back into awareness. “Breathe for me Clara, and tell me what’s wrong.”

What’s wrong is she’s been hurting him without even meaning to for years. Guilt churns through the panic, and she is trapped and she is dangerous and She. Is. Human. “That time, on Skaro. The wasn’t the first time I was a Dalek.”

He flinches, and his grip on her shoulders tightens. “No,” he says darkly.

“I remember being Oswin. Most of the time you never saw my echoes. But that time we talked. Flirted even. I saved you. But I was a Dalek the whole time, and didn’t know it.” She remembers the horror of the realization, the sinking sickness in a stomach she no longer had, and the blind terror she’d also felt as Missy taunted her, and her best friend stared her down with a loaded gun and everything she said came out exactly wrong.

“I couldn’t save you. You were beyond saving.” He presses a kiss to her shoulder and she feels the spatter of tears on her skin. “When I saw you in that casing on Skaro – my hearts dropped. It was like my worst nightmare brought to life. And this time you nearly died at my own hands.”

She cards her fingers through his curls. “I’m sorry, Doctor.”

He looks up at her, fierce. “That was Missy’s fault, not yours. Never yours.”

“You could have said something.”

“No I could not. You were exhausted and terrified enough, and only in that state because of me. You didn’t need to mollycoddle a foolish old man. It was better that you didn’t remember Oswin.”

She’s glad she does now, though, even if she also remembers the terror. So many times she’s saved the Doctor, but this time she’d fought against an evil from within to do it. “She was brave.”

“Oh, Clara, you’re always brave. I just wish you were a little more careful.”

She worries about him, now more than ever. He’s far too dependent on her presence – or perhaps he’s only now letting show a weakness that was always there. As much as she enjoys being the focus of his adoration she fears its power. They may have fifty or sixty blissful years together but she will hurt him in the end. And he will have most of eternity to mourn and rage, until the reckless living kills him, possibly taking out innocents in the process.

She would have killed them both once, if he hadn’t tricked her with the sleep patch.

And somehow she’s already put him through that pain, again and again, as if the universe has him in a confession dial of its own, determined to wear him down to protect itself.

She knows he’s too stubborn to give in. And she’s gone too far to walk away now. “You’ve watched me die so many times. I’m sorry.”

“I wish you would stop doing that. It’s most unpleasant.” The gravity of his tone belies the lightness of his words. It’s not _unpleasant_. It is the shattering of his world – and any other worlds that get in the way.

“Just one time more, now,” she whispers.

“One more is too many,” he swears.

“But it cannot be helped.” She must keep reminding him of this, as much as it hurts, because he must accept it before the end. That is her role now, as the carer of his heart. She must cherish it and prepare it to be broken.

A life with Danny would have been easier indeed.

He pulls her to him, two magnets slotting together, and she’s still not quite used to how quickly he’s now prone to embrace her. It is a form of hiding, but at least now they’re hiding from the world and not each other.

“Run, you clever boy, and remember. It’s what you always say at the end. Means goodbye.”

But she thinks of the deaths she can remember, and that doesn’t seem quite right. She knows she shouldn’t encourage false hope, but a cheeky remark slips out regardless. “Nah. Means see you later.”

* * *

It’s Gran she wants to visit next. It should be her father, she knows, but nothing’s been the same since her mother died and when Linda came round it got even worse. She misses him, and he misses her surely, but he’d be harder to fool and there’s no way he’d keep her being alive quiet.

But Gran is eighty six and takes meds to sleep through the night, and she’s always seemed to understand whenever Clara is sad.

“You’re supposed to be dead,” the Doctor bleats when she makes her request. “The universe! Might as well use the TARDIS to write ‘Clara Oswald is alive’ across the skies of London.”

“I just want to see her one more time.”

She flashes her big brown eyes at him. His tone softens, and she knows he was never really cross to begin with. Just nervous about repercussions, and resigned to the fact that she’s already gotten her way. “That we could manage. She’d never have to know.”

“But I want her to know.” Her chin quivers, and the matter is settled.

The plan they concoct involves a fog machine and a gauzy nightdress. The TARDIS lands in her Gran’s kitchen, and from the hallway the Doctor emits a pulse from his sonic that rouses the woman.

She blinks as she pushes herself into a more upright position, her rheumy eyes immediately focusing on Clara, who stands in an artificial mist.

“I knew you weren’t really gone,” she says, and Clara chokes back a sob. Unless they’ve overshot it’s only been a year but it looks like Gran’s aged at least five, and as Clara watches her extract her wrinkled and trembling hands from the sheets she realizes her secret is safe with Gram because the woman doesn’t have much time left to tell anyone else.

“But I am,” Clara whispers, and this lie hurts because on the surface it’s true.

“Then what are you doing here?”

“This is a dream.”  Clara flaps her long sleeves to swirl the smoke around herself, but Gran only chuckles.

“I’m old dear, not an idiot.” The Doctor barks out a laugh from the doorway and Clara turns and glares. He raises his hands in surrender, a smile tugging at his lips, and the weight on her heart lifts.

“So you brought your friend, I see. I thought it was very suspicious that he wasn’t at the funeral.”

“I was a bit tied up,” the Doctor offers.

Gran’s attention returns to her. “You didn’t feel gone. When Johnny died the world was suddenly different. Colder. But the world stayed just as bright this time. You just weren’t there.”

“I missed you.”

“Then come over here and give me a hug. I’d get up but I might trip in all that ridiculous smoke.”

Clara sits gingerly on the bed and then twists to wrap her arms around her grandmother, careful not to squeeze too hard. She seems so frail, yet there is a strength in her grasp that suggests that maybe all these years didn’t matter.

“My sweet girl,” she says as she pulls away, and then presses a kiss to her forehead. Clara feels ten years old again, on one of her cherished weekends with Gran, where they ate ice cream for dinner and no boys were allowed. “Linda tried to bury you in that revolting pink dress she bought you for Easter. But I insisted on that bow tie sweater you loved so much.”

“How’s Dad?” she asks as she leans into her Gran’s shoulder. The thought of him at her funeral chokes her up, but she reminders herself of that necessity by thinking of the universe imploding at her selfishness.

“He’s getting along. He’s been good at that, ever since Ellie. Linda has been helpful, I suppose.”

“You can’t tell him I was here.”

“Who’d believe me anyway?” Gran fingers the fabric of her ridiculous sleeve, but Clara notices the way her thumb slips down to rest against her beating pulse. “I wanted to bury you with your mother’s book. But I couldn’t find it.”

“That’s because I have it. I’ve visited every place inside it now. And more than a hundred other places besides.”

“That’s good. You were always meant to see the world. I could tell that from a little girl. And when you find someone to travel with that’s the best gift life can offer. Don’t worry about those you’ve left behind. Run, Clara, live and never look back.”

She has not realized until this instant how much she needed this absolution. She covers Gran’s hand with her own, commits the feeling to memory. “I will.”

“But perhaps lay off the theatrics. They’re not very convincing.”

The Doctor draws attention to himself again by chuckling. Gran points to him with her free hand. “And you, young man. You still owe me a game of Twister.”

And once more like that little girl, Clara giggles into her grandmother’s neck.

They stay until Gran falls asleep. The Doctor takes Clara’s hand as she walks away. They fog machine is left behind.

Back in the TARDIS Clara collapses against the wall. There will be five minutes a day for Gran now. But at least she has no regrets.

When she opens her eyes the Doctor is sitting in his pilot chair, and he turns from his machine to Clara. “Your grandmother was flirting with me,” he says conspiratorially, testing her mood.

She smiles. “I think she was, yeah.”

“Humans,” he scoffs as he throws the TARDIS into gear.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay, but this has gotten so long, guys! I was originally going to wrap everything up in a final chapter, which I then realized I’d have to split into two. Today I came to the conclusion it best be three parts. The positive is I do already have about half of part two written already, so it hopefully won’t take too long to finish.
> 
> Please let me know what you think. Which scene was your favorite? What would you like to see? Even a few words will make my day.


	4. Elysian Fields - Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Clara comes up with a plan to deal with the matter of Orson Pink.

She corners him one day when he is frantically scribbling some equation on the chalkboards. It is a fine view from his pilot seat, and the cup of tea in her hands is meant to sooth her. But the scratching of the chalk stirs her thoughts, giving them added gravity. She is already certain that she is right.

“I’ve been thinking, Doctor.”

“Should I be worried?” He doesn’t turn or stop writing, but it’s a good sign that he’s listening at least, and that his tone is light with teasing.

“About Orson Pink.” The scratching stops. He freezes.

“Whatever for?” he eventually asks, voice cold like it so often used to be.

“He won’t exist now, will he? Because Danny never had any children.”

“We never knew for certain that Danny was Orson’s ancestor.”

“Come now, Doctor. Maybe you didn’t notice they looked exactly alike, but I certainly did. Same last name too.”

“He may have descended from one of Danny’s relatives.”

“Danny didn’t have any. He was an only child. His dad was an only child.”

The Doctor still hasn’t turned, and Clara takes another bracing gulp of tea. “The universe compensates, as long as an event isn’t a fixed point. Could be that Orson Pink was meant to exist, but he never will due to our meddling. That sort of thing probably happens a lot, we just don’t know it.”

“But everything we did together, with Orson. That base at the end of the universe. We remember it happening. If Orson doesn’t exist, how could we?”

“Perhaps there was someone else.”

“But the TARDIS fixed on Orson because I was looking for Danny. If someone else was there we never would have met them.”

“Then perhaps once the universe realizes that we’ll forget.”

She cannot stop the sharp intake of breath at the confirmation of her fear. With his superior Timelord hearing the Doctor notices, and finally turns to face her. “Why does that matter?” he demands.

“I think Orson Pink needs to exist,” she replies, not an answer at all. Her heart pounds as she thinks what she is committing to, but she is decided.

“That ship has sailed,” he says coldly.

“We have a time machine.”

“Absolutely not!” His hands spasm at his sides as he drops the chalk and it shatters across the TARDIS floor. “I would do nearly anything for you, Clara, but I have limits. I will not stand by and facilitate you sleeping with that PE teacher to right a wrong that frankly does not even matter!”

“Oi!” She snaps back, slamming her mug on the console and stalking towards him. “That is not what I meant!” She presses her palms over his hearts, which are racing, and he flinches, either at her tone or the unexpected contact. She takes a deep breath to calm herself. “I was thinking we could take a page from your people’s book.”

“That phrase is unilluminating.”

She rolls her eyes at him. “Taking all the feelings out of biology.” His eyebrows twitch but he still looks lost. She breathes deeply, already feeling a headache coming on. “Danny had trouble finding a job when he came back from the war.”

“Employers may be rightly skeptical of hiring a murderer—”

“Stop it!” she hisses. He’d been more tolerant of mentions of Danny since her resurrection, even calling him by name most of the time, but jealousy seemed to have reverted him to his childishly spiteful self. “He needed money, so he,” she pauses, feeling the blush in her cheeks. Sleeping with the Doctor somehow doesn’t make this any weirder to talk about, “sold some of his sperm.”

“He actually told you that romantic little tidbit?”

“There was a game. We might have been a bit drunk.” At the Doctor’s scoff she snapped, “He was actually honest.”

“Then perhaps this conversation is unnecessary. There could be countless descendants of PE’s out there already.”

“They wouldn’t have his last name. And they wouldn’t know that their grandmother was a time traveler.”

“This is a cold reason to have a child.”

This time she is the one who flinches away, and she takes a few steps backwards and wraps her arms around herself. It’s been a long time since he’s hurt her so deeply, but he’s not entirely wrong.

“Why does this matter, Clara?” he asks again, his voice kinder now. He steps towards her and wipes his thumb under her cheek. She hadn’t realized that she’d been crying.

“There’s something I never told you. That day, with Rupert and Orson. The TARDIS landed somewhere when you were unconscious and I went outside to investigate. We were in a Barn and someone was coming so I hid under a bed. And I realized from what they were saying, that the child in the bed–” She reaches up, stroking her hand down his neck. “It was you.”

He narrows his eyes but she doesn’t let him interrupt. “I told you something. Something that I hope you remembered. ‘Fear is a superpower.’”

“Fear can make you faster, and cleverer, and stronger,” he finishes, his brogue drawn out with wonder. “That was you?”

“Yes. I guessed right then, didn’t I? That moment was important to you. And I’m afraid, once the universe realizes it will never happen, I’ll wake up beside a very different man. Or perhaps I won’t wake up beside you at all.”

“Clara. My Clara. You’ve been saving me far longer than I ever realized.” He draws her towards him, kissing her with so much tenderness she actually trembles, but his arm comes around her waist to hold her steady.

After they break apart she keeps her forehead pressed against his. “I won’t have that undone. Not if I can prevent it.”

“But to bear a child to ensure a conversation. That’s quite extreme. And timey wimey even for me.”

“He’d have Danny’s genes, but he’d be your son.” She watches as that hits home, the spark of yearning that comes across his face before he buries it.

“Son?”

“Would have to be. Only boys would carry on his last name.”

“He’d be a Pink then.” It’s the pain beneath the bitterness that she fears. She’s not doing this to hurt him, but to heal him, but there’s a chance that this may backfire. Their son may be a constant reminder of his inadequacy. Yet she hopes he’s grown enough to see beyond it.

“We would love him so much it wouldn’t matter.” She watches him carefully as she says it, judging his reaction. “We both know why we can’t have children of our own.” Since they were already courting disaster just by staying together, they’d agreed it best not to put the universe in further jeopardy by deliberately combining their warrior races, no matter how she dreamed of whispering in his ear that he wouldn’t be alone when she was gone, of watching him converse with their little one, spoiling her with the most ridiculous sonic toys, of staring at her newborn and trying to discern if she could see anything of his former self in his features. He had seemed to mourn the possibility just as she did. Now she needed him to latch onto this alternative. “But we could still be parents.”

She watches him study her, and she wishes she could understand all the thoughts in his fathomless mind. It is easy enough to project her own desires and insecurities, but there are moments that remind her how truly alien he is, with millennia of formulating experiences and a cultural history that is counter to nearly everything important in hers.

When he draws her to him, his chin on the top of her head, his arms shake but his voice is steady. “That is an adventure I haven’t had in a long while. And never quite like this.”

* * *

They go back a few years to when Clara was alive and hack into the clinic’s database. She uses the computer skills she picked up from the Great Intelligence to find the number for Danny’s sample. The following day they walk into the clinic, hand in hand.

Everything about the experience is supremely uncomfortable, right from the moment they walk in the door and the receptionist assumes she’s brought her father for support. Next come the probing questions about why she needs a donor when she has a boyfriend, and she regrets allowing him to come with her. His hand holding hers under the table doesn’t keep her from worrying about the way he’s probably beating himself up for everyone’s simpleton ageist attitudes. She has to break up too rows when he thinks Clara’s honor has been questioned, and then there’s the awkward politically correct way the case worker dances around the fact that Clara has selected a black donor.

By the time they get out of there with an appointment with a fertility specialist, Clara is mortified and nursing a massive headache.

“I cannot believe that everyone who works there was so horrible!” Clara vents as soon as they step inside the TARDIS, which hums reassuringly in solidarity. “All the things the case worker said! And what she didn’t say, but was clearly thinking!”

The Doctor goes immediately to the console and sends them back into the vortex. “That woman was right,” he says, not looking at her.

She wants to sob with frustration. This is what she’d been most afraid of the entire time. “She most certainly was not! We’ve been over this. I don’t care how old you look. For two thousand years, give or take four billion, I’d say you look pretty damn fantastic.”

Finally he looks up at her, and he doesn’t appear angry at all. Or even devastated. “I’m far too old to be anyone’s boyfriend. Husband sounds much better, don’t you think?”

His eyes are sparkling, his face split with a mad grin and her mind blanks. “What?”

He steps away from the console. “I’m sorry, did I do that wrong? I don’t have a card for this situation.”

She is suddenly struck by the strong, irrational fear that he will _take it back._ “No, keep going!”

He takes a few more steps towards her, although he is still too far away. “You are my everything, Clara. Marry me. If you want.”

The way he’s looking at her makes her want to swoon right into a pile of mush on the floor. She is not that kind of girl, but _damn._ “Do Timelords even do that?” she asks weakly. She’s been so certain that they didn’t that she hadn’t been expecting this.

His hands flap about as he responds. “Sure. Typically for political or economic gain. Generally with fewer tears and a smaller floral bill. But seeing as I’ve come into a rather large UNIT salary, you can have as many flowers as you want.”

“You’re actually serious?” Presuming that marrying a Timelord was an impossibility, she had convinced herself that such symbolic gestures didn’t matter as long as she was by his side. Suddenly faced with the possibility she sees through her lies, and an unexpected thrill ripples through her, starting with her skin and ending with her soul.

“Utterly. From what I gather humans use marriage as a public profession of their love, and also as a way to stake their claim. This impregnation process has reminded me just how much the thought of you with another man displeases me. You are mine, Clara Oswald, for as long as there is life in your body. In turn I am yours, for as long as there is life in mine.”

He is fierce, almost feral, and the part of her that is a sensible feminist thinks that she should be upset that he dares claim to own her. Except that it is true, and it’s fine because it’s reciprocal. The thought of owning him, this demi-god in the shape of a man, is incomprehensible and yet she believes him.

There’s also the fact that there is something about his dominance that turns her on, arousal curling in her stomach at the growl in his voice. She had waited so long for him to be clear about his intentions and here they are, right out in the open.

Except they’re only reciprocal on the surface. “I’d never hold you to that. I don’t want you to be alone after I’m gone.”

“There may come a future version of me who has never seen you with his own eyes who can forget enough to move on and love another. But this body is yours.”

She tackles him then, pushing him back against the TARDIS console. He pulls her into his lap as their lips collide again and again, fierce and breathless with joyous promise. The TARDIS hums beneath them, offering her blessing, and Clara reaches down to pat the console fondly before burying her hand back in the Doctor’s hair.

“That a yes, Boss?” he asks when they finally break apart, his lips swollen, his cheeks rosy, and his eyes so indescribably fond.

“That’s a God yes,” she quips, and then she kisses him again.

* * *

He offers her anywhere in time or space to get married. She chooses Space Glasgow.

“Space Glasgow, really?” he scoffs. “We could get married on top of the Eiffel Tower. In a gondola on the moon of Phoon. Or beside the singing towers of Darillium. Every romantic place there ever was and you want to get married in Space Glasgow.”

“Yes,” she insists. “It was important to us. Now we get to create a new memory there.”

She knows why he hates and fears that city, but she won’t let him run from it. And she wants to see the place with her own eyes. Of all the memories she’s recovered, their last days together hasn’t been among them.

She finds a white dress in the TARDIS wardrobe, with long lace sleeves and cut to her knees. It has a thick belt of TARDIS blue. “Thanks, old girl,” she whispers. The machine has been kind to her lately, and she likes to think it has realized that they are allies now in caring for the Doctor.

She spins in the mirror. The dress fits perfectly, and while it may not be a traditional choice this is hardly a traditional wedding.

There are no guests. They don’t even enlist an officiant. She is legally dead, and he’s hardly about to send his marital records back to Gallifrey, a planet that probably but not definitely does not remember that he broke all their rules and used their technology to liberate her from death once.

They are the only ones who matter, anyway. This is not a legal binding. It is a symbolic one.

She emerges from the TARDIS to find him standing by the water, the sunrise vivid at his back. There are colors there that Earth’s atmosphere never contains, vivid purples and crystalline greens that remind her of his former self, as if the parts of him that died are watching over them in approval. But after a second all she can see is him, blatantly staring at where she appeared from the TARDIS. His is wearing a simple black suit, with a bowtie of all things. She giggles and he grins back, looking so incredibly happy that she practically runs to his side.

“I was going to play a waltz,” he pouts, nodding towards his guitar, which is indeed lying on the grass by his feet, his sonic sunglasses folded on top.

“You’re wearing a bowtie,” she comments, reaching out to touch the item in question.

He captures her hand, raises it to his mouth for a chaste kiss, and then lowers it between them. Her other hand soon follows.

“Seemed fitting. He would have been very glad to be here. And perhaps today we could both do with some of his childish mania.”

She laughs at the aptness of his description.

They swear secret vows to one another, the truest whisperings of their hearts, of mutual respect and need and adoration, and love so strong the mightiest of beings quaked at its power.

The ring he slips on her finger has alternating diamonds and sapphires set in a platinum band, and perfectly matches the engagement ring he’d realized hours after his proposal that he’d meant to give her before they got caught up in each other. Clara had found his ring in the wardrobe, another gift from the TARDIS, and the ship had made an exception and translated in her mind the coiling Gallifreyan embossed in gold on the platinum band – Love and Faith and Fortitude.

They kiss for a long time, and afterwards they stand with their foreheads pressed together. “So,” she whispers. “Is there anything special newlywed couples do on Gallifrey?”

“There is one thing.” He blushes slightly, and that hadn’t been what she’d been thinking at all but she doesn’t mind. “Not Timelords, mind, but those low born Gallifreyans that live in the wastelands and still marry for love instead of convenience.”

He is teasing but she loves him for it. “And what do these unevolved individuals do on their wedding day?”

“They open their minds to one another.”

He sounds so vulnerable, and the possibility of that steals her breath. How many times has she wished to understand what he was thinking?

“Gallifreyans are telepathic—” he begins to explain.

“Would that work for us? Because I’m not.”

“Would you want it to work?”

“Yes,” she answers immediately.

He smiles, his relief evident. “Probably only when we have a physical connection. I’ve always been a fairly rubbish telepath but with the proper motivation I should be able to support the link both ways.”

“Can we do it here? Now? Or do we need to be somewhere alone?”

His lip twitches into a smirk. “We do not have to take off our clothes, if that’s what you mean.” He leans down and brushes his lips against her ear. “There will plenty of time for that later.” He pulls back enough to watch the look on her face. “This will be intimate enough even fully dressed.”

“Well, now that I’m completely distracted, what do I need to do?”

He laughs, and the sound makes her giddy in turn. “Just close your eyes and focus on me.”

She obeys, and after a second she feels his cool fingers at her temples. She thinks of those fingers, the strength in them as they grab her hand and pull her away from danger, their gentleness when they brush away her tears. How a well-placed touch can drive her wild, show her every star in the universe all at once.

“Clara.”

His voice is so close and so rich that she feels the shiver go right through her – and his answering chuckle bowls her over again. “There you are. Now, don’t open your eyes, but look at me.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” she contends, except suddenly there he is before her, standing in the middle of the TARDIS control room. “How did we get here?” she asks, taking in the familiar space.

“We’re not here, really. We’re in my mind.” It makes a strange kind of sense. The writing on the chalkboards doesn’t match the equations he’s been working on at all. She sees: “ _Run you clever boy, and remember”_ written in his script, crossed out with: “ _Nah. It means see you later.”_ in her handwriting beneath it. Another board has _“Orson Pink”_ scrawled across it, a third the first few stanzas of Ode to Joy.

 _Of course his mind would look like his TARDIS_ , she thinks, but he reacts like she’d said it out loud.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Means there’s nothing you love more than your ship,” she teases.

“There’s you.” She _feels_ how sincerely he means that, but within a few heavy seconds it recedes into slight panic. “Please don’t tell her I said that!”

“I wouldn’t dare.” She twirls around the console. When she brushes her hand against its surface she is flooded with such a wave of love and awe and adoration that she pitches forward. With both hands braced against the controls the emotions intensify.

And then he is at her elbow, pulling her gently away and into his chest. “Maybe you best not absorb that all at once.” He pushes a few strands of hair away from her face, his finger lingering with the same tenderness she had just felt emanating from the TARDIS, a tenderness as soft as a newborn’s skin and fathomless as the ocean and powerful as a hurricane. “It’s how I feel about you, you know.”

“Why me?” It’s the question she has never understood and never dared to ask. It’s not self-pity or self-deprecation – she’s quite the catch for any human bloke, except for the lying bit and the slight fear of commitment. But his is a marvel and she’s just another pudding brain. “I’m just an ordinary girl in an extraordinary world.”

“Let me show you.”

One of the TV screens alights, and she sees herself standing on a doorstep, repeating “Doctor Who?” again and again at his prompting. The scenes change with no sense of order, countless moments of bravery and joy and flirting. The time she told him the TARDIS was smaller on the outside and their hug when she and Missy had tracked him to the Middle Ages and the time she swung a mace at a Cyberman. Jumping into his timestream, telling him to ask her again tomorrow, begging him to stay alive if he loved her in any way at all. Every time she returned to Trenzalore, and when she didn’t leave him after the Orient Express.

“Clara Oswald, you are anything but ordinary. You were a mystery when I needed a reason to keep going and my conscience in some of my darkest moments. You flirted with me yet you made me come back for you. You trusted me when it was imperative but not without cause. And you’ve never been intimidated by what I am. I need that. If too many people treat me like a Timelord I start to act like one. But you demand that I be better than them. And I want to be, if only to see you smile at me and keep running by my side a little bit longer.”

All the words she can usually command so well elude her, but she doesn’t need them here. She just thinks of everything he means to her, her mad man in his magical box, saving children and righting wrongs, protecting all the wonders of the universe with just his wits, his gab and a few sonic tricks.

By the way his smile widens and his eyes twinkle as they look at her, like his former self used to do when he was overcome by wonder at her very existence, she knows he hears.

“I have a gift for you.”

“Another one? A girl could get spoiled. I’ll start expecting you to top this at anniversaries, you know.”

“Well, it’s really a gift I’ve already given. You just haven’t noticed yet.”

“It’s like you’re being romantic and insulting me all at once. Is this my life now?”

“This is why I’m not a fan of banter. Makes people ridiculous.”

“And the Doctor _never_ does ridiculous,” she teases, thinking of monk’s robes and bowties and playing dodgems in his archenemy’s chair.

“Low blow. You love it,” he says drolly.

“Yeah. Never change.”

She says it without thinking, the unintended slight only sinking in when she feels him take notice. “I might,” he answers. “But this won’t.” Her imagine on the screen is replaced by a band of silver, and inside that band is a series of gold coils, the same language that adorns the outside of his ring, but there is something about this particular pattern that is so beautiful it brings tears to her eyes, though she cannot explain why.

“What is that?” she asks.

“It’s the engraving inside your wedding ring.”

“It’s your name,” she breathes, because that’s the only possible explanation.

She can sense how glad he is that she’s worked it out.  Seeking his approval has made her cleverer, but the potential was always there, waiting for something to inspire her to rise to the occasion.

“Aye. I may not have a proper surname to give you, but my true name is yours to carry now.”

It is a great honor, and she feels the weight of the absolute trust he has bestowed.

“Your ring says something as well. Though it’s hardly one of the greatest secrets of the universe.”

“Show me,” he commands.

“How?”

He pulls the sonic sunglasses from his front pocket. “You can use these.”

But he hadn’t needed them, and this feels like a test. So she just thinks of the moment she’d found the ring, and how she’d wished for a way to leave her mark and the TARDIS had provided the engraving tool. How she’d taken such care to make sure the message fit properly. How she’d wished she’d had something more inspired to say.

And then the inside of his ring is displayed on the screen and the words appear letter by letter, as if written by an invisible hand. _Your Impossible Girl_.

“You are certainly that,” he chuckles. “I still can’t believe you’re here. Even after all that time imagining you were with me, I never thought it could be possible.”

She takes his hand and is overwhelmed by an all-encompassing sense of peace, so opposite of the energy he always projects.

“It’s because of you, Clara,” he whispers. “You make me calm, when for so long all I’ve known is noise and nerves and an itch to run and never look back.”

She wants to show him all the ways he’s saved her too. How he woke so many things that were dormant inside her – courage and wonder and love.

“If this is your mind, can we visit mine?”

“Sure. It should be right outside that door.” He looks to the exit of the TARDIS, and she knows whatever is outside is significant, but its contents are a mystery.

“Will it be a place like this? I’ve never thought of my mind like that.”

He shrugs, and she feels his jibe about humans’ lack of imagination starting to percolate but it never takes form. “Let’s find out.”

They join hands and push open the door of the TARDIS together, stepping out into a lush green countryside.

“I don’t even know where we are,” Clara pouts. There’s something familiar about the flowers and the hedges but this is not a special place from her childhood or some inner sanctum that she retreats to.

“Oh but I do,” the Doctors crows, and his joy buzzes through her arm and straight to her chest. “We’re in Jane Austen’s garden!”

She’d had a lovely time with Jane, discussing _Sense and Sensibility_ before it had even been written, yet that hardly explained why her mind would choose this place to project. “Why here?”

“I think because it was the first place I did this.” Then he is kissing her, his hands framing her face, the memory of his desperation and dead Clara’s shock combining with has adoration in this moment, and all of it reverberating back as he felt the way it affected her. She is drowning and soaring all the once, like an overloaded circuit board melting into something more beautiful.

When she opens her eyes she is back by the river in Space Glasgow, the Doctor’s hands in her hair and his lips millimeters from hers, though the force of his emotions has retreated. “Might have gotten a bit carried away,” he whispers, but then he kisses her again, soft and tender and over far too quickly, but it helps her come down off the high.

“You can get carried away whenever you like.”

He’s in such a good mood that he doesn’t even protest when she makes him pose for photos snapped on her phone as if they were just best mates showing off their vacation. They’re perfect anyway, the way the glasses slide down his nose as he laughs and how he blushes when she kisses him on the cheek and the way he looks at her instead of the camera. It doesn’t even matter that her makeup is smudged and his fingers have ruined her perfect hairstyle because their happiness is impossible to mask.

If she happens to print off her favorite and mail it to Rigsy, well, she’s allowed one act of bridal frivolity. She hadn’t made him pay for any flowers.

* * *

They spend a month honeymooning, playing tourist at all the most romantic destinations in the universe, and they only stop one coop and run for their life twice. Afterwards they go back to the clinic. They stay in England only long enough to confirm that Clara is pregnant, and then they move to America.

They’d contemplated Earth’s version of Glasgow, but decide that as part of the United Kingdom it’s too close to UNIT’s reach. This child needs to be born on Earth and settle there so his descendants think time traveling is an accomplishment, but in a few years Clara is supposed to be dead and it’ll be no good for Kate Lethbridge-Stewart to sniff her out the next time she thinks Earth needs saving.

The Doctor withdraws a sizable amount of money from his untouched UNIT salary and buys a house in Nevada, on the edge of a tiny little town that the Doctor declares unremarkable throughout history. “Teensy bit remarkable now,” Clara teases. “Since this is the places the Doctor settles down.”

“I’m not settling down,” he argues. “We’re just taking a brief sabbatical.”

Clara had wanted to keep running for a few more months. But the Doctor had fretted too much as the baby grew, and after they got separated during a zombie uprising the Doctor parked the TARDIS in the attic and declared them both grounded until the baby was born.

“Besides, if you want the baby to be properly human it’s best for him not to spend too much time in the time vortex,” the Doctor declares, and Clara can’t decide whether he’s being serious.

The Doctor spends the first three days in a frenzy, modifying the house. It is simple yet spacious, more than enough room for three.

The very first thing he does is paint the door blue. “Did this for Amy and Rory once,” he tells her as she watches him, the harsh sun making his faded Beatles t-shirt stick to him with sweat. “Gave them a flat and painted the door blue so they wouldn’t forget me.”

He’s begun to speak freely of his past, offering her memories the way he once offered her facts about the universe. She knows in particular how much those two meant to him; how they’d shaped the man he’d been when he and Clara first met.

Next he builds a porch. All because he insists she deserves a porch swing.

He paints that blue too.

As well as the window frames.

“What are the neighbors going to think?” He’s somehow gotten paint on his cheek. She corners him as soon as he comes down the ladder, licking her thumb and then rubbing it against the dried spot.

He leans into her touch, his eyes drifting closed for a few seconds. “They’re hardly going to think that the paint matches the time machine in our attic. In all my thousands of years of experience with humans I’ve never know them to be so logically astute.”

“Watch it!”

He kisses her on the nose before spinning away. Paint flies from the brush still in his hand and spatters her dress, but he doesn’t notice. “They’re think we’re eccentric, Clara. But we are! Might as well set realistic expectations for the start!”

On the third night they end up on the porch swing as the sun sets, her head in his lap as he weaves his fingers through her hair. She misses England and her family and her body aches and she is so tired of spontaneous nausea, and yet every day is filled with amazing promise. She has never been so happy.

“Why Nevada, Doctor?”

He stares off into the dessert instead of looking down at her, but his fingers move slightly to stroke along her neck. “Because this view reminds me of Gallifrey.”

“The drylands where you grew up,” she realizes.

“Yes.”

“Were you happy there?” she asks. Of all the stories he’s told her few are from the place where he was born, even though she knows he lived their several hundred years before he started to travel.

“I suppose I was, once. In the way that children don’t know any better. But the fear of the hybrid dogged me ever since I wandered into the Cloisters. By the time I left I’d begun to see the Timelords for what they are, though it would be a long time until I fully understood.”

“You were married.”

“Yes. A marriage of convenience, like a well behaved little Timelord.” He looks down at her then, his smile wry. “That was nothing like this, I assure you.”

“You mean you didn’t run about painting every available surface blue?”

His eyes twinkle, though he maintains a serious expression. “Seeing as a very special woman had not yet advised me which TARDIS to steal, I didn’t even know that was my favorite color. So no.” He tilts his head and his eyebrows rise. “There may have been an explosion of fuchsia before my first daughter was born.”

She laughs at that, glad to know that his ridiculousness is universal. Glad that the accents of their house are blue and not pink.

It becomes a habit to watch the sunset together. They’ve been settled for a week when she asks him the question that’s been bothering her so persistently that she’s sure he’s started to sense it on the edge of her consciousness.

He seems calm as he sits here with her; his fingers don’t even twitch. He seems calm when they lie together at night, and he whispers to the baby when he thinks she’s sleeping. He seems anything but calm during the day, when he’s like a tornado tearing through their home, rebuilding it into something just as alien as him. “It’s still five months until the baby comes. It will be years after that until he’s old enough to function on his own. Can you really stand sitting still for that long?”

“So _that’s_ what’s had you so worried.” She can read the way he’s impressed with himself for noticing in his tone, but not anything about how he feels about her concern.

“Not an answer.”

“Fretting’s no good for the baby. Or for you.” He brings their joined hands to his mouth, kissing his way across her knuckles.

“Still not an answer.”

“A few regenerations ago I was terrified of the slow path. Rose and I almost got stuck without our TARDIS once, and as much as I wanted to spend the rest of her life with her, the thought of jobs and mortgages and living each day in a linear fashion seemed overwhelmingly dull. A few hundred years later I stayed with Amy and Rory on Earth. I could feel our time together was ending, and I didn’t want to lose them. So I tried. Could only make it a few days. It was boring.”

Panic churns in her stomach, worse than the morning sickness, because she’s always known this about him. For some reason she’s just made herself forget. “Not the answer I was hoping for, honestly.”

“I’m not finished, Clara. I’m not that man anymore. Literally. Or philosophically, I suppose.”

“What’s changed?”

“Trenzalore. For hundreds of years I stayed, and that was longer than I’ve been any place, even Gallifrey. And I discovered the slow path wasn’t so bad.”

“I’m not sure I’d call fighting an endless war against all your worst enemies _slow._ ”

“There was also the toy mending. Don’t forget about that!”

“Never.”

“They needed me there. And Amy and Rory didn’t, you see. They wanted me there, because they cared for me, but I wasn’t essential. They had their own lives. They had each other. But you, Clara, you need me. So I’ll stay.”

“You are essential to me,” she vows. “And you’ll be essential to this baby. But I won’t fault you if you need to travel without me for a bit. Just as long as you always come back.”

He kisses her forehead and pulls her tighter into his side, one hand resting gently on her stomach. “I think I’ve given up traveling alone. If I managed a few hundred years on Trenzalore I think I can survive a few here on Earth – especially with my family to distract me.”

“Besides,” he whispers into her ear, “think of the toys I’m going to invent!”

* * *

The Doctor may be capable of the slow path, but Clara isn’t, so when she discovers there’s an opening at the local school she takes it. The term ends three weeks before the baby’s due, so the timing’s perfect.

Her timing when she goes into labor is less perfect.

It hasn’t rained in nearly two months, but when her water breaks they’re in the middle of a deluge, the water coming down in sheets that limit all visibility. The nearest hospital is almost an hour away.

“Can’t we just take the TARDIS?” Clara whines as he helps her into the passenger seat of her car. They’d been outside two minutes, and she’s already drenched. Pain tears through her, and she wants a warm bed, some strong drugs and someone who knows what they’re doing.

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea. You are set on this baby being fully human, right?”

“Right now all I’m set on is this baby getting out of me!”

“Just a few more hours, love.” He kisses her on the forehead. They way his hair is plastered to his face makes him look like a drowning owl. Then the door slams shut and a minute later he appears in the driver’s seat.

The ride is terrifying as he speeds around corners in the blinding rain, his knuckles white against the steering wheel, occasionally offering unhelpful sophisms like “Breath, Clara” and “We’re almost there” (which they aren’t). He drives a car even more erratically than he drives his TARDIS, and it’s thankful that few others are driving through the desert tonight because sometimes he forgets which side of the road he’s supposed to be following. Through the agonizing haze of the contractions she imagines a horrible crash where the Doctor wakes up regenerated to find his wife dead by his side.

“I would never let anything happen to you!” the Doctor says sharply, though Clara notices he seems to slow down after that.

When they finally reach the hospital there are wheelchairs and orderlies and a great deal of rushing about. Her soaked clothes are replaced by a scratchy hospital gown and the Doctor paces about the room, muttering to himself and snapping at the nurses.

“Why ever did I insist we settle in Nevada of all places? It’s barely civilized! Human hospitals are always barbaric, but this is barely adequate. And the route to the hospital – I should have taken that into account. That’s on me alone. Stupid, stupid Doctor! But she’s obviously in distress and you’re supposed to be making her calm. Why aren’t you doing your jobs?!”

The actual doctor threatens to have him removed, and she cannot face this without him. “Just stop your bleating and come here and hold my hand!” she commands.

He obeys with a sheepish, “Yes, Boss.” The moment her hand closes over his she feels his mind reach out to hers. He is far from calm, yet his faith in her wraps around her like a warm blanket, instantly soothing. _You can do this, Clara. Your body was built for this. Human women have been giving birth since the dawn of your species, and none of them were as brave and strong and marvelous as you. Though blimey, that hurts._

She laughs, much to the obstetrician’s confusion, and the pain becomes just a bit more manageable as he whispers a litany of encouragement straight into her mind and she endeavors to break every bone in his hand. 

Hours later it is finally over and the nurse places a perfect, squirming baby in her arms. “It’s a boy,” she says, but Clara had already known that.

She’d half expected the child to look exactly like Danny, the way that Orson had, but his skin is lighter, a warm brown somewhere between his shade and hers. She imagines she can see a bit of herself in his nose. Mostly the child will be his own person.

The Doctor had been shooed away during the final moments, and he lingers by the wall. She looks up and sees the way he is staring. “We’re not even touching and I can hear your thoughts from over there. Of course you can hold him.”

The Doctor crosses the room in three long steps, kissing her gently on the forehead before gingerly taking the baby from her arms. “Hello young man.” It’s not the voice most adults use with babies. His tone hasn’t softened at all, nor has the volume decreased, but there is a warmth there, and Clara’s heart swells. She has always loved watching the Doctor with children.

“You can’t speak baby,” she realizes as she listens to his side of the conversation. “You’re just in his head.”

“Of course. Why would babies have a whole separate language? That’s absurd. They speak human as soon as they are able to vocalize. It just takes them a while to manage it, so they compensate by projecting their thoughts quite loudly.”

“So you’re on duty when he wakes up screaming in the middle of the night. Good to know.”

“Whatever you need.” He’s hardly paying her any mind at all, his attention consumed by the baby, and all the pain from the past few hours drains away and she is filled with such love for the both of them that she can hardly breathe around it.

“May I suggest a name?”

Her fears that he might not accept this baby seem so silly, in retrospect. “As long as it’s something all the kids at school will be able to spell and pronounce.”

“Rory,” he offers.

“Why?”

“Because Rory Williams was the most loyal man I ever met.  And this child is fiercely protective of you already. He’s also a bit suspicious of me, as Rory was at first. But he’ll come around.”

“Rory Oswald Pink.” The name feels right on her tongue, but she looks to the boy in question for his approval. “What does he think of that?”

“Thinks his Mum is always right.”

She smirks at that, then lets her eyes drift closed. “Teaching him to butter me up already, hmm? Guess I’m outnumbered now.”

The Doctor’s lips brush against her forehead and then her cheek as she feels him settle beside her. “Yes ma’am. But never outranked.”

* * *

The child is a marvel, and the Doctor has always loved marvelous things. Even at minutes old Rory emanates a strength of character that the Doctor knows will only grow with his body. Within him the Doctor sees everything he had asked of Clara in what he had once thought was his final speech to her – never cruel, never cowardly, a fine sense of humor and a strong aversion to pears. He clutches onto the life the universe almost didn’t grant him with a stubbornness born of his mother, unaware of the lengths she’d been willing to go to bring him into this world - an impossible child for his impossible girl.

He finds that the bits that are Danny don’t bother him now that they’re combined with the mounds that are Clara, and all the pieces that are distinctly Rory, a new being just waiting for a chance to leave his mark on the world around him. He’s already left his mark on one Timelord, from the moment he arrived.

The only problem is that humans are obsessed with appearances, and his family is not a matched set. He and Clara get enough odd looks due to the apparent difference in their ages, but Rory’s brown skin adds to the confusion. The story they tell is not far from the truth – that Rory’s father died, and Clara fell in love with the Doctor afterwards. They leave out the bit about the artificial insemination and ignore just how long after Danny’s death Rory came along, and the people who know them accept that well enough, even if they don’t understand how a stunner like her fell for someone so old. But the people who don’t know them, who just walk past when they go into town, don’t even know the lies. The differences unsettle them, and they whisper, and though the Doctor almost believes Clara when she tells him she doesn’t mind he knows one day Rory will be old enough to listen, and he will.

He wishes he could shield the boy from that. Wishes it so hard that sometimes he dreams of another regeneration, one with fewer lines and darker skin who no stranger would doubt was Rory’s father. Clara would kill him again if he tried anything like that, he knows, and he wouldn’t be able to control it anyway. But he wants to lay claim to his son, and since he cannot give him his name or his lifespan he wishes at least he could give him familiar features, so he would never listen to offhanded cruelty and wonder if he was truly wanted.

Instead he gives him promises –to wake in the night and feed him and always be there when he has a nightmare and take him to see the Beatles when he’s old enough. He counters his instinctual itch to run with his family’s need for him to stay and finds he doesn’t even resent it, because they make his life richer sitting around their kitchen eating pizza than it would be if he was feasting alone with Cleopatra. There are wonders in each moment of domesticity that he’s never experienced before.

He plays stay at home dad when Clara goes back to teaching, though he teases her mercilessly for being the one who can’t stand still.  Truthfully he doesn’t mind, because he and Rory get on swimmingly and it gives him the perfect cover to continue his research.

She’s getting older. He doesn’t notice on his own, but he does catch her studying her appearance too long in the mirror, and he feels the residual sadness that lingers in her consciousness each time she spots a wrinkle or finds a gray hair. She’s been very practical about the matter, trying to prepare him for the eventuality, but he cannot accept it.

For his world will crumble without Clara Oswald. That has been true longer than he dare admit – perhaps it has always been true, the way she is interwoven through his timestream – but there is no way to deny that it is true now. He has given her his name and his mind and his body and every relevant detail of his past and he no longer knows how to function without her guidance. She fills a weakness deep inside him that needs something better than himself to cling to, so he can model that instead of the baser instincts of his nature. He does not know what he will be without her, only that it’s best for all if he does not find out.

He cannot lose her, so he won’t. The universe is vast and wondrous and occasionally there are miracles, and he is determined to find one. With all of space and time at his fingertips there are plenty of examples of humans seeking immortality, but most of them backfire like the Morpheus machine and he has learned from what he did to Ashildr – he will not make Clara into a monster. It is her humanity that has tamed him and he must not take that from her, but he must find a way to give her more years. So he searches, and experiments, and though he makes little progress he never stops trying.

Until, as usual, the TARDIS sends him where he needs to be.

When Rory is six they start traveling again, though only on weekends, and only to places that Clara deems safe – and she has a far narrower definition of the word than the Doctor.

By seven she allows the TARDIS to make that distinction but not the Doctor, which is frankly a little insulting but perhaps not entirely unjustified.

Shortly after Rory turns eight the TARDIS ignores their coordinates and brings them to a mystery planet. Clara stares at the reading with her lip between her teeth, obviously torn between protecting her young and indulging the sense of adventure she’s spent years suppressing.

“It’s perfectly safe,” the Doctor assures her, because the TARDIS has been very clear on this point. He and his machine had quite a heart to heart the first time they took Rory aboard, and he knows the old girl will protect their precious cargo.

“Can we please, Mum? I asked her to take us someplace awesome for my birthday.”

He’d found Rory up in the attic a few years ago, before he’d ever been out traveling, talking to the ship like they were old friends, and while it shouldn’t be strictly possible he finds the idea adorable enough that whenever Rory mentions their conversations the Doctor lets him get away with anything. Which he expects the boy knows.

Clara has never been able to say no to someplace awesome. “All right. But you hold on to your father’s hand the entire time, you hear me! No wandering off.”

“Ah. Do you know how many times I’ve said that to companions over the years? They never listen.”

“He better.”

“Yes, Boss,” they both say in unison.

They step out into a crowded street, and he notices at least nine distinct species almost immediately. “Oh good, a marketplace. Almost always a good time, an alien marketplace.”

It’s a perfect educational experience for Rory, because there are so many races to identify and explain. Clara takes his other hand as they wander, and he’s missed her wide eyed delight at anything new.

“Is this a commerce planet, Doctor?” she asks as he works his way through a booth of musical instruments and contemplates taking up the flute instead of the guitar.

“Not one that I’m aware of it. Unless it’s a secret commerce planet. Which would seem a bit counterproductive. Unless it’s a black market!”

“That sounds dodgy." She glances sideways at Rory, scowling a bit.

“That can’t be it then. The TARDIS brought us here, after all. Perfectly safe. Perfectly above board.”

“But the people here. Haven’t you noticed? All sorts, except it’s never pairs of the same species together.”

He hadn’t noticed, but it’s blatantly obvious now. A Judoon walks besides a Silurian, a human beside a Slitheen. A few even hold hands, and no one acts as if this isn’t typical behavior.

“What is this place?” he wonders aloud, and he pulls out his sonic screwdriver to take a reading. Clara retrieves the pair of sonic glasses he made for her from her pocket, ready to make her own observations.

“You are guests here.” The woman who appears before them moves with a cat-like grace, although her face is humanoid, albeit a pale blue.

“Glasses give it away, don’t they? Make us look like tourists.”

“You ignorance gives you away,” the woman answers smoothly. “Though this planet can only be found by those that need it. Is it refuge that you seek?”

“Nope,” Clara says, grabbing on to Rory’s arm even though the Doctor still has him by the hand. “We’ve already got a home. Two, actually.”

“So you’ve come for the bonding ritual.”

“We’re already married,” the Doctor corrects. He’s skeptical of rituals in general, and all too aware that running is going to be a bit more difficult with Rory in tow.

The woman pulls what looks like a twenty-seventh generation iPad from her robes and sends a flash of light in both their directions. She scans the results with vague interest as the Doctor inches close enough that he’ll be able to grab Clara’s arm so he can tell her the plan telepathically if need be.

“The words you’ve sworn don’t change the fact that you have lived thousands of years, and might live thousands more, but she has only a brief, mortal lifespan. You may be a Lord of Time, but you cannot stop her years from slipping away like sand through an hourglass. How will you go on after her death?”

“I won’t,” he admits, the pain of contemplating that day making him honest. He has lost her too many times already. He knows how it feels.

“Stop it!” Clara scolds. “You’re hurting him!”

“No. I am offering him a gift.” The woman turns back to him, and her eyes sparkle with purple fire. “What would you do to keep her with you?”

“Anything,” he admits. Though he knows Clara will judge him for it it’s the only answer he can give.

“That’s why you have found your way here, where so many lovers have come before. You are hardly the first mismatched souls to fall in love, though I have not met many of your kind. Timelords are normally too proud.”

“Stop playing games,” Clara demands. She’s puffed up like a chicken guarding her nest, hands on her hips to make her appear bigger than she is. So much spirit in such a small package. He’d always loved that. Now it turns him on, spins him about. His mind is already on overdrive, trying to work out where they are and what it could mean. “Tell us what you can do for us.”

“We can bind your life forces together. As long as he lives, so will you.”

“And if he dies?” Clara doesn’t even falter, but one of his hearts skips in his chest.

“If you are still within your mortal lifespan there is a chance your body would survive. It is unlikely your soul would.”

“And what if something happens to me?”

“His body might go on, but his soul would be irrevocably damaged.”

“Will I keep aging?” She fires off questions like a polished attorney, seemingly unfazed, while he imagines every possible way this could end badly.

“You cells will adjust to decay at the same rate his do.”

“And what if he regenerates?”

“I cannot say. Few Timelords have ever undergone the bonding ritual. It is possible you would die before your body realized his would revive.”

“What’s the catch?” the Doctor demands, infuriated that this blue monster would dare to lift their hopes. “There’s always a catch.”

“There is no catch.”

“A cost then! Nothing’s free in the world. No good deed goes unpunished. What do miracle procedures go for nowadays?”

He wants the woman to flinch away at his anger. But she just stares back serenely, with the damned unflappability of a nun. Her robes suggest a religious order, and he’s had plenty of trouble with those.

“The cost is the gift itself. To ensure a life together, you must both sacrifice your autonomy. The procedure is irreversible.”

“I’ll do it.”

“Clara, no!” Her eyes are wide in her face as she turns towards him, and she approaches him slowly, as if he might startle. She raises one hand and presses it to his cheek and he cannot help the way he leans into her.

“Isn’t this what you want?” she whispers. Her head is tilted and she is frowning at him.

“More than anything.” He allows himself just one second to imagine all the rest of his years with this woman by his side. Then he shatters the mirage with a heavy sigh. “That’s the problem.”

“How is that a problem?”

“Because I never get what I want.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” she says in the tone she uses when she’s certain she’s won an argument. “You have me, and Rory, and the best time machine in the universe.”

“Temporarily. But everything ends, Clara. I used to think that the universe owed me a gift, but it doesn’t.”

“But maybe it’s going to give you one now that you’ve stopped asking.”

“I can’t ask you to do this! There are too many risks.”

“I never asked you to keep me safe, Doctor. I’ve told you that. I swore that I would love you for the rest of my life, and you swore the same. I didn’t want to hold you to that, but I will now. I’m not afraid of whatever this ritual will do to me. I know that you are, but – fear is a superpower, remember? Don’t let it take this chance away from us.”

“Oh, Clara. Doesn’t this all seem a bit – hybrid-y?”

She takes a deep breath, and he can see her working that though. “Maybe,” she relents. “But I thought we weren’t going to dwell on that.”

“We weren’t going to court it either.” It would be so easy to give in, but it’s her voice that suggests caution. “This feels reckless.”

Her eyes light up, and he remembers watching her hang from her ankles out of the TARDIS and thinking that there was something a little destructive in her glee.

A little familiar.

“It’s been so long since we’ve been reckless. I miss reckless,” she says wistfully.

“You were supposed to swear off reckless!” he hisses.

“And we have. Instead we have carpools and PTA meetings and crosschecking catastrophic events for every waypoint we visit. I love the life that we’ve built but there are going to be risks no matter how careful we are, and sometimes they’ll be worth it. We shouldn’t be afraid to take them.”

She could always convince him of almost anything. There was something tricky about her voice, like hypnosis. Everything inside his hearts wants to give in, to hold on tight and never let go, consequences be damned. But he’s trained his mind to argue with her, and he’s had billions of years to let his head rule. “What if I regenerate?”

“You’ll just have to be careful. Most of the universe only gets to die once. Join the club.”

“You’re hardly one to talk.” All her deaths are no laughing matter, but it’s automatic to push back when she presses him.

She smirks, and then pushes herself up on her toes so she can comb one hand through his hair and brace the other against his shoulder as she leans towards his ear. She is so close that everything else falls away, and she knows full well how she is affecting him.

“You’re better when I’m there to stop you. You’ve said so before. So let me always be there to stop you.”

Her breath makes him shiver but it’s her words that contract his soul in ecstasy. He yearns for that so fiercely that it steals his words and his breath. To never again know the crushing loss and the emptiness that follows. To have this magnificent woman by his side, always.

He wants to toss all his bothersome rules out the window.

That has always been the problem. Why Missy pushed them together. They leave chaos in their wake, _and he does not care_.

And sometimes she does, but sometimes she doesn’t, and he doesn’t know if that stems from capricious human ignorance or the same selfishness that afflicts him.

She is better than him, stronger, but she is not infallible.

“The ripples Clara! The ripples and the rules and the tidal waves! I’m not supposed to take what I want if the universe might suffer. But I’ve never been able to say no to you.”

Her touch is soothing and inflaming all at once. Her lips brush against his skin, as tantalizing as the serpent in the garden. “Then don’t. Be selfish, just this once, and I’ll spend the rest of our lives making sure no one suffers for it. We can be Doctors together.”

The idea of that shatters his resolve. He has already entrusted her with his life. It is time to rely on that promise.

His lips drop to press, fleetingly, against her forehead and then he sinks further to kiss her properly.

“Damnation has never been so sweet,” he whispers against her lips.

When she pulls away she is as bright at the sun rising over Akhaten. “Not damned today, Doctor. Blessed.”

He must choose to believe that. He spins away from her and fixes the priestess with a grin. “So, Blue, this bonding ritual. How do we begin?”

* * *

They are escorted to a cathedral by seven chanting acolytes of various species. Once they are situated on the plush chairs where the altar should be two of the women stick them with needles and begin to remove a sizable amount of blood.

Clara has never minded the sight of blood – as long as it is coming out of someone else. Seeing her own has always made her a bit queasy, so instead she focuses on where her hand is clenched in the Doctor’s. For nine years the fear of how the Doctor would cope with her death has lingered constantly at the back of her mind, just as the raven had followed her on one hundred and one journeys. The sudden absence of that fear is sharper than any adrenaline and more effusive than the effects of any alien liquor. She feels free in a way that she can never recall.

“You can say I told you so now.”

“What?” His jaw is clenched, his eyebrows on the attack, and she desperately wants him to be as excited as she is. But she knows that sometimes he needs time to adjust.

“Every time I told you you’d have to lose me someday you insisted that wasn’t true. And you were right. So go ahead, brag a little. I shouldn’t have doubted you.”

He turns towards her and she can see in his face the war he’s waging against himself. “I can’t. Not yet. Not until it’s finished and we’re sure.”

She squeezes his hand and pushes easily into his mind. Every screen in the TARDIS flashes a different tragic image: glimpses of farewells and fallen civilizations and every time he watched her die. All the chalkboards are covered with Gallifreyan calculations, the elegant swirls crushed together, their lines unsteady. The Doctor stands in the middle of the room, his hands in his pockets, forlorn.

Clara glares at the console and the screens shut off one by one, their static giving way to silence. She moves to the nearest board and erases its contents, writing “We’re Going to Win” in its place.

She snaps and the rest of the boards clear, and she wishes she could use that trick at school. She smiles at the Doctor as she approaches, and she hugs him tightly, pressing her ear against one of his pounding hearts. She doesn’t slip out of his mind until he hugs her back.

“Fair enough,” she tells him, back in the chair with the blood pumping out of her arm. “But one day you’ll look back and say I told you so, and I’ll give you this one. Just this once.”

The corner of his lip turns up just a little, the beginning of a sheepish grin, and it’s enough.

It’s a big bag of blood that is taken from both of them, and Clara feels lightheaded when the needle is removed. But the Doctor watches the acolytes closely and squeezes her hand when they all start to file out of the room with the bags.

 _I can’t let that out of my sight,_ he thinks at her. _That much Timelord blood in the wrong hands could be extremely dangerous_.

 _Go_ , she urges. _I can handle myself here._

No one is pleased when the Doctor insists on observing their secret mysteries, but he is persistent and they cave quickly enough. Clara waits until they’re gone to close her eyes, not wanting the Doctor to know how much the ritual has taken out of her.

“Cranberry juice and jammy dodgers?” she calls out to no one in particular. “What, you don’t do that here? Just Earth then.”

“Are you okay, Mum?” Clara opens her eyes to find Rory by her side, his eyes wide with concern as he clutches his toy helicopter with the sonic blades.

“I’m fine, love,” she assures, pushing back the exhaustion so she can smile at him and pat her lap. “Come sit with me.”

He obliges, though soon he will be too big for such behavior. Danny was tall, and it seems like Rory will follow suit. He’s already lost the roundness of his childhood. His gangliness reminds her a bit of her first Doctor, though he lacks Eleven’s bravado.

“I’m sorry your birthday trip got boring. We’ll go someplace else next weekend. You can choose.”

“The marketplace was cool.” He reaches out and touches her arm. They’d bandaged it quickly, but red has already seeped through the gauze. “What are they doing to you and Dad?”

She looks away from the blood and focuses instead on Rory’s eyes. She sees Danny there sometimes, his quiet compassion and uncertainty. It’s stopped making her feel guilty long ago; Rory is as fine a legacy as Danny could have wished for. “It’ll help me live longer.”

“So he won’t be alone.”

“Exactly.” She runs her hand through his hair. He shouldn’t be able to make that leap, not at his age, but the boy has always been clever. Sometimes she wonders if that’s because the Doctor’s been in his head, guiding him, years before he should have been capable of speech.

“Then I got my birthday wish.”

“Pardon?” she asks, her eyes narrowing into her patented Mom glare.

“He’s been looking for a way to do that for _ages_.” He’s too young to have such gravity, and she wants to giggle at his tone, but she’s too surprised by his revelation. “But he wasn’t getting anywhere. So I asked the TARDIS if maybe she could help.”

 _My impossible boy_ , she thinks, her wonder at this child catching in her throat, causing tears to burn behind her eyes. She wraps her arms around him so he won’t see, and drops a kiss to the top of his head.

“That was very clever. Sometimes your Dad misses what’s right in front of him.”

“Are they going to take my blood too?”

Suddenly she realizes that this is the cost. This precious boy will age and die, and she will witness it now, sharing in the Doctor’s rage and grief. Afterwards they will drift apart from his family, overwhelmed by the pain, because when Orson finds them he will know their story but not their faces.

Yet she must bear it without complaint, for the Doctor has already suffered four billion years on her behalf. The least she can do is share in this burden, because it means the Doctor will not face it alone.

“No.” She understands what the Doctor meant about hugs hiding your face. Seconds pass before she can stand to look him in the eye.

“It’s okay, Mum,” he says, and he reaches out to brush her tears away. “I don’t want to get that old anyway.”

Her chuckle is only one step above a sob but she tries to smile. That day is a long way off. So many times she has advised the Doctor that he must not dwell on the future. She must take her own advice.

“Tea?”

She flinches at the unexpected voice from the doorway. The blue woman has returned, offering a clear glass of something green and steaming.

“This part of the ritual?”

“No. But you were looking a bit pale.”

Clara cannot help but look at the woman’s blue skin. From her answering smile she suspects the priestess comprehends the humor.

“I’m Clara,” she says, taking the drink. “And this is Rory.”

“Amaldia.”

The tea has a strange taste and a strong kick, but it sooths her queasy stomach. “Thanks for this. And I apologize for my husband. I’m sure he’s making things quite difficult.”

Amaldia smirks, her purple eyes sparkling. “He does not trust in what he cannot understand. Many here have felt the same, though Timelords are particularly guilty.”

“What is this place?” she asks. “I don’t even know its name.”

“You lips could not pronounce it. Translated it means Sanctuary of the Wolf.”

“Like a werewolf? Because if this is all some real life Twilight thing that would be amazing. Also a little bit depressing.”

“I know not of this werewolf that you speak. And the twilights here are unexceptional. The Wolf was a powerful being – some say the most powerful. She loved a mortal, not of her kind, one who was both older and younger than herself. Many years ago she came here—”

“Nanobots!” the Doctor declares as he bounds into the room, his arms flapping about. “They use nanobots to correct the blood type and remove anything our bodies would reject,” he explains as he drops back into his chair. He waits until the acolytes who followed him insert IVs into their arms and retreat before he continues. “They wouldn’t explain most of the compounds they added, and I have no idea how they could possibly work as promised. There was a lot of,” he lowers his voice and leans towards her, “chanting.”

Rory giggles at his tone and the Doctor swipes his free hand over his head. “We’re boring you, aren’t we son? We’ll go somewhere exciting next. Exciting and—” He catches Clara’s glare “—very, very safe.”

The liquid in the bags sparkles gold like the Doctor’s regeneration energy. She doesn’t care how it works, frankly, only that it does. She watches his blood pump into her arm, no longer repulsed because the color is so unfamiliar. Her lingering lightheadedness clears almost immediately, and everything around her sharpens. Colors seems richer, sounds more resonant. A phantom heart seems to beat in the other side of her chest, but she presses her hand there and cannot feel it.

“I could find no scientific explanation,” the Doctor tells her, and she hears the catch in his voice and the way his breathing pattern has shifted ever so slightly. “But according to the sonic three of the acolytes were beyond the typical lifespan of their species.”

She runs her thumb along his wrist, marveling at the way he feels just slightly warmer than usual. “Maybe the Timelords aren’t the only ones who are very clever.”

The last bit of blood is used to ink golden infinity signs on their wrists. The seven acolytes circle around them, their chanting starting quietly and rising into a soaring chorus which strangely the TARDIS doesn’t translate. Clara expects to be asked to join in, and she thinks of everything she could say to explain why this risk isn’t a risk at all, how she would defend their worthiness to receive such a gift and how best to explain this love that’s consumed her, day and night, for more than a decade. The words of their vows run through her mind, the shape of his name a seal upon her heart.

But when the world falls suddenly silent, neither Clara nor the Doctor are asked to say anything at all.

“May your love be your sustenance,” Amaldia declares, and they are practically pushed out the door to find the whole city reveling in their honor.

* * *

Many hours and alien cocktails later, after Rory is put to bed, the Doctor traces Clara’s infinity sign with his tongue as he hovers above her. _Are you really going to stay with me?_  he asks in her mind, heartrendingly vulnerable, as if the idea is too heretical to be voiced aloud.

“Forever,” she promises with her mouth, her mind, her body.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And to think I thought all this could fit at the end of last chapter - Whew! 
> 
> The pretty much all came about because Orson Pink is such an unresolved plot hole that bothered me ever since Danny died. So I fixed it. 
> 
> Comments are very much appreciated. Thank you for reading!


	5. Elysian Fields - Part 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Hybrid prophesy comes to pass ... but it's not what anyone expects.

Rory is twelve when they stand in the ruins of Gallifrey. Rassilon’s pride, not his heart, had broken when he’d been exiled, and he allies with the Cybermen in an attempt to mend it - an attempt that quickly spirals out of control. In his arrogance Rassilon overestimates his power over the conversion process. As an ultra-intelligent converted hoard sweeps over the planet while the Cloister Bells toll the terrified Timelords call on their errant president to defend his homeland.

For the first time the Doctor and Clara regret their bond because it means he cannot send her away to protect their son. It is the only time she might have willingly left him, her need to keep Rory safe just slightly stronger than her need to stand beside her husband in what could well be his final battle. But the uncertainty of their bond’s parameters make that too risky. She will feel it if he dies, and while he trusts her to be as strong as she is able he cannot expose Rory to the possible trauma of watching her fade before his eyes. Instead they lock the boy in the TARDIS, faced with the unbearable decision of how to set the emergency protocols, the only safe places they can think to send him the apartments of a grandfather he’d never met or the Victorian household of a Silurian, a Sontaran, and a human maid. Orson’s existence makes it imperative that Rory grow up in modern times, so Clara records a message for her Dad she desperately hopes he’ll never have to see.

Billions are converted before they find a way to stop the madman. Though Gallifrey will rebuild the victory feels hollow, and Clara fears the Doctor will hear the Cloister Bells in his head for a long time. She expects to dream of the terrible look in his eye when the army had fallen as one vast unit, and the way it had faded to an even more frightening blankness.

As soon as the cyber army is dismantled the Doctor returns immediately to their TARDIS, shunning the cleanup with a stony silence. He sweeps Rory into his arms and does not let go until he has parked in their attic and tucked him into bed. Instead of telling a story the Doctor plays a song, one that blends the melody he’d composed for Rory and the one he’d written for Clara with something far darker, his pain at the savagery he had witnessed bleeding through the discordant notes. As Clara watches from the doorway she is glad that Rory falls asleep quickly, worn out from three days worrying, because the song cuts her to shreds and he is too young to know such heartbreak.

When the Doctor finally finishes he leans the guitar against the wall. Clara can see the way his fingers shake as he leans down and gathers the boy in his arms once more. “Sleep safe, my son, and know that you are loved,” he whispers, pressing his lips to the top of the boy’s head before retreating.

The sight of her two boys together chases away the pain and fear of the past few days. She had seen the Doctor at his most dangerous, a firebrand warrior smiting down his enemies without mercy, the Oncoming Storm of old, avenging the lost souls of the drylands from the emotionless husks they had become. He’d had no choice; she cannot fault him. The Gallifreyans were lost the moment they underwent conversion, and no clever ramblings or second chances could restore them. If they had not been utterly destroyed they would have spread across creation like a virus, annihilating every species in their path. Yet it soothes her to see him again as the man that she loves. Children have always made him gentler. She remembers the way a child’s cries had convinced him to save a Viking village, how he had spent hundreds of years surrounded by the children of Trenzalore, giving them hope when otherwise all they would know is war. There is something so pure about the bond he shares with Rory. He is an outstanding father, even if he can sometimes be an aggravating husband.

It is why she has mourned, so many times, that they cannot have children of their own. All of time and space and the prospect of eternity, and he can only raise another man’s child. It isn’t _fair_ , but Clara has known since the day her mother died that life is not, in general.

Except, as he walks towards her, not even trying to hide the agony that makes him look his age, ancient and anguished, realization sparks, like the moment he discovers how he’s going to win. Their world has shifted since the Doctor was summoned, and there is one particular aspect of that change that is not distressing.

Clara reaches for him but he shrugs out of her grasp, brushing past her towards their bedroom. She knows he must be drowning in guilt to shun her comfort, but she is not about to let him suffer alone.

He drops onto their bed like a sinking stone, his head in his hands, his elbows braced against his knees.

She sits gingerly beside him and lays a hand on his thigh to make him aware of her presence before she nestles into his side. His breathing is erratic, and when she reaches up to stroke his temple she finds a wall blocking her from his mind.

“You don’t want to go there now,” he growls, his voice a dark whisper. “I’m not sure you could stand it, and I won’t have anyone else hurt today.”

His rejection stings, but she refuses to be so easily deterred. They have both survived, and Rory is safe, and she will cheer him up.

“I think we should have another baby,” she declares without preamble.

He doesn’t even look at her as he asks, “Do you have a father in mind?” sounding absolutely devastated. He hasn’t been so melancholic since their bonding. The resignation doesn’t suit him.

“There is this one bloke I’ve been sleeping with for a while.”

The Doctor’s eyebrows rise practically to his hairline as his neck swivels so he can stare at her in shock. She feels guilty for hurting him for even one second on such a bad day but she hadn’t expected him to be so thick.

“I mean you, you pudding brain.” She checks him with her shoulder, shoving into him slightly.

His surprise settles into a frown, his eyebrows still on the attack. “You know why we can’t.”

“I know why we thought we couldn’t. But we just faced the Hybrid – and it wasn’t us.”

“It was still my fault. I deposed Rassilon. Everything he did to regain his throne is on me.”

“That’s rubbish.” She pulls away slightly, crosses her arms, and glares. She feels a surge of satisfaction as he shifts closer to her, like a magnet being pulled towards its opposite pole. “Rassilon was a monster! That’s why you exiled him. It’s not your fault he went even more psychotic. Yes, maybe you had a hand in it, and that’s probably why you’ve been running from the prophesy for so long, but you are not responsible for what he did, so don’t you dare let him do any more damage than he already has. What’s important here is we got it wrong. The Hybrid wasn’t us, and it isn’t our children. So we could have them. Children of our own.” She grabs one of his hands and holds on tight, her thumb stretching down to feel the way his pulse pounds against his infinity mark. “We could have so many years together, and Rory will be grown before we know it. You’re such an amazing father, and you deserve to have a child of your own. We deserve … God, why aren’t you saying anything? You’re always saying something.”

His silence unnerves her and she stops mid-ramble. His anger has faded but his face is a blank canvas that she cannot read. She wants to dip into his mind but that feels like it would be cheating.

“We just prepared to send Rory away and you think the solution is to have more children?”

She chuckles coldly, refusing to be derailed by his apparent rejection. “Not a parent of the year moment, yeah. But he would have been safe. Lots of people with dangerous jobs have children. Maybe we just need to work on the backup plan. Decide on some godparents and actually warm them of their duties.”

Without warning he is surging towards her, and her eyes close as his lips latch on to hers, his hands coming around her waist to pull her effortlessly into his lap. When she needs to break for breath he kisses his way across her jaw and nuzzles into her neck, leaving her giddy. She opens her eyes to find him staring at her in wide-eyed delight.

One of the first things she’d learned about the Doctor was how quickly he’s distracted. Perhaps it is selfish, to allow the thought of another child to cheer him instead of doing the hard work herself. Having Rory was selfish, in a way, but it was one of the best decisions she ever made.

“That a yes, Doctor Oswald?” she whispers, finally allowing herself to imagine what their child would be like without following the image with a chaser of guilt.

He strokes her face, tucking her hair behind her ear. “I would have a hundred children with you, Mrs. Oswald.”

She laughs at his sincerity. “If you want a hundred kids, we’re going to have to look into that Looming thing.”

“But the human way is much more fun,” he pouts, voice deliciously low, as he pulls her down and proceeds to prove his point.

* * *

 

There’s no clinics this time, no awkward visits to doctor’s offices while he pretends to be an anxious human father and everyone who works there pretends not to disapprove. He scans her hormone levels so frequently it becomes annoying, and then it surpasses annoying and the buzz of his sonic sweeping over her becomes such a regular occurrence that she learns to ignore it.

She can’t ignore the time it cuts off suddenly, as he drops his screwdriver and pulls her into a kiss, right in front of Rory and several dozen patrons of the largest aquarium in the universe.

Six weeks later he drags her down to the TARDIS medbay. His puppy-like enthusiasm is catching, and even the normally serious Rory has been silly all month, responding to his father’s cues. They plot a list of places they will take the baby, and instigate a delegation of chores that seems overly enthusiastic, but Clara’s not about to complain that she no longer has to do the laundry.

The Doctor instructs her to lie down and swivels a scanner over her stomach as he stares down at her through his sonic sunglasses so long she starts to get nervous.

“Everything okay in there?” she asks, trying to keep her voice light. “It doesn’t have two heads, does it?”

“Two heads, yes,” he answers absentmindedly, in the voice he uses when he’s barely paying her any mind, which she hopes is the case in this moment. “All four hearts in working order.”

“Four hearts!” she squeaks, the thought of the labor and piles of diapers almost more than she can stand. At this rate the boys will be doing her chores for a lot longer than nine months. “You could have warned me I might have a litter.”

He looks up at her sharply, but she can’t see his eyes through the dark lenses. “Four hearts. Two babies.” He snatches the glasses from his face and drops them carefully on her nose.

“Right. Sorry,” she starts to say, but the image projected on the lenses steals her words. They’re little more than smudges on a canvas, but she knows with soul searing certainty that these are their children. He leans down to press a kiss to the top of her head, his hands gentle at her shoulders.

She presses the button on the arm of the glasses that projects the image to the nearest monitor so they can both watch. The sound of the four heartbeats fills the room, their very own chaotic symphony.

“You’ve done so well, Clara. Look at them.” There is such warmth in his Scottish brogue. It seems so long ago that she’d despaired that this version of him would ever address her so fondly.

“We’ve done well.” They’d worried their genomes might not be compatible, because human/Timelord offspring were rare. But here are their children on the screen, healthy and strong, and it brings tears to her eyes as her heart swells with a desperate yearning to hold them in her arms.

“Suppose we have,” he chuckles. “Who would have thought? Grumpy old me, a father again at my age.”

She shifts her gaze to watch his shy smile. His eyes are also a little bright. “Two hearts each, huh. Does that mean they’ll be like you?”

His grin turns smug. “I had expected as much. After all River was a Timelord even though both her parents were human, just because she was conceived in the time vortex.”

She rolls her eyes. “That’s always seemed like dodgy biology to me. And the time vortex is hardly the only place these two could have been conceived.”

He narrows his eyes. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but there’s also the matter of my—”

“Superior Timelord genes?” she finishes archly, daring him to contradict her – or agree.

“Mmmhmm,” he answers as noncommittally as he can manage.

“It’s not the genes as much as the personality that has me worried.”

“I shall try not to be offended by that,” he pouts.

“I don’t mean you. I mean the rest of your lot. And okay, occasionally you.” She remembers the Cloisters now, and the General’s lack of remorse for all the Doctor had suffered at their hands. They’d seen Clara as a curiosity, and the Doctor, their greatest war hero, as weakened by affection. Even as their planet had crumbled under Rassilon’s greed they’d remained so cold.

And Missy was another story altogether.

“Do you know why I travel with humans?”

Years ago she would have made a joke about how he finds them amusing, with their short attention spans and reality television. But she senses he’s being serious and she knows the answer he’s looking for. “Because we’re your conscience and your carers.”

He takes one of her hands, squeezing it gently before he rests both of them on her stomach. “Exactly. My companions make sure I don’t act too much like a Timelord. They’d never put up with me if I did. You in particular have always excelled at making me better. And our children will always carry a piece of you with them. Instant humanity, whenever they need it. They’ll be fine. They’ll be better than fine. They’ll be brilliant.”

“Geronimo,” she whispers, because in that moment she can see her former Doctor, boyish glee shining out from his old eyes.

There’s no jealously in his response anymore, his answering smile a little bit sad, but also a little bit fond. “He would have been overjoyed to be here with you like this.”

“He is,” she insists pointedly, and he grins in return. Ever since he’d stopped hiding his feelings for her it’s become easier to reconcile the two version of him she knows best. The primary reason he’d seemed like such a different man was because he had pretended so fervently to be one.

“There is another advantage to them being like me. Two hearts means they’ll have my lifespan.”

He’s tentative, as if he isn’t certain she’ll appreciate that.  But it only takes a few seconds to work out the glorious implications. “Which means we won’t have to say goodbye.”

“Not unless we’re very unlucky.”

It’s Rory who will be the unlucky one, and that’s a loss they’ll have to live with. One Clara can’t contemplate facing. She knows she will understand the Doctor so much better on the day she buries her child.

But that day’s a long way off.

This summer’s just begun. 

* * *

 

 

This time when the babies come there are no hysterics or white-knuckle drive. He escorts her calmly via TARDIS to the best hospital in the nearest galaxy, and she gets over the fact all the nurses are cats as soon as they give her some proper drugs. He holds her hand the entire time, his voice in her head offering a litany of nonsensical encouragement, and his excitement buzzes through the pain, making her nearly as giddy.

And when the cat-people hand them each a child, purring congratulations, Clara can only tear her eyes away from the tiny, perfect, marvelous person in her arms so she can take in the look in his.

He is so absolutely reverent that it steals her breath and overwhelms her with silent tears. She blames the hormones for the way she sobs, but the moment is perfect and she is utterly exhausted. Her husband stares at their daughter with wide, moist eyes, his fingers tracing feather light patterns across her skin that might be the secrets of the universe. His brows furrow in concentration, and she knows they are having a private conversation. For a second she envies his telepathy, but when she reaches down to brush her fingers across her baby’s soft skin she is flooded with love and curiosity and a voice whispering “Mama” as clearly as if she were shouting in her ear.

Clara gasps. The Doctor’s eyes find hers immediately, wide and concerned.

“I can hear her,” she stutters, ending on a laugh that becomes a watery sob as her little girl giggles at her foolishness.

“I had hoped,” he whispers, leaning towards her to press his lips to her forehead. “They’re a marvel, Clara,” he says against her skin, and in that instant she realizes how right he is, because these two are products of a love that had thwarted death and linearity, but every heartbreak and hardship has been worth it for this moment. Nevermore will the Doctor be the last of his kind.

“What should we name them?” she asks, already picturing all the ways they will be like him. She’ll surely be driven half mad by the time they can talk – and it will be absolutely worth it.

She isn’t expecting his hesitation. “I don’t have to decide that,” he answers, pulling away from her slightly. “You’re allowed to have opinions.”

“Clearly,” she says, too tired to put any bite behind it. “My opinion is I’ve done all the hard work and now it’s time for you to pull your weight.”

He chuckles at her sass, and it’s one of her favorite sounds in the world, because he’s finally learned how to let himself be happy. He reaches over to take the baby from her arms and then stares at both of them intently, his gaze shifting occasionally from one to the other. They focus back more attentively than babies ought.  She wonders, if she touched his hand, whether she could be part of his examination, but she doesn’t dare break the spell. There seems something almost sacred about the moment. A naming ceremony, unbound by centuries of pomp and protocol.

These children will be named by love, not coldness.

When he finally looks up there is something hesitant in the gesture. Worry flares – for surely he has found no flaw or defect. “What wrong?”

“Nothing,” he assures.  “I’m just not sure that you’ll find my suggestions acceptable.”

There are a million names he could give that she absolutely wouldn’t, but she’s not worried this time. Not after Rory was perfect. “No way to know until you tell me.”

He looks down again, pressing his lips against one tiny head already covered in red wisps, and one covered in gold. When he looks up again he still seems worried.

“Amy. And Rose.”

His words evoke a pang within her, but it’s not jealousy exactly. The swelling warmth is love and sadness tied together. “Why?”

“Because this one will be a handful,” he predicts, and his words have lost all hesitation. “She’ll never let anything in the universe hold her down. But she’ll love, fiercely. She’ll be magnificent.”

Tears prick at her eyes because she wants that with the same ferocity. “And Rose?”

“Less than an hour old, and she already sees the wonder in this world. This is just a hospital room. Wait until she sees all the things we can show her! Her joy – it will sustain us on the darkest of days.”

Clara is reminded of the day that she stood among three versions of him while the youngest one cast judgement. She knows with certainty how this regeneration would have been described – the one who remembers. She hadn’t thought that had been the case once; she’d been so sure he’d broken his former self’s final promise to her. But she knows now that everything this man is is because of who he once was. And she loves it all – his scars and insecurities and alien sensibilities and deep, abiding loyalty.

She remembers how touched she had been when she discovered Rigsy had named his daughter after her. She is glad her children will be legacies to those who had shaped the Doctor into who he is.

“It’s perfect,” she proclaims.

“Yeah?” he asks tentatively, a smile stealing gradually over his features as his eyes widen and his eyebrows rise with the corners of his mouth.

She nods, her words stopped up by the swelling in her chest. She pitches toward him to rest her head on his shoulder and he presses his lips to her hair, his joy spilling into her mind across the connection. _Their impossible family._ She could stay in this moment forever. Except she knows the Doctor will have to get up soon to fetch Rory. Her family won’t be complete until he’s snuggled amongst them, bringing his own awe and love and clever curiosity. Yet she can’t bear to leave this moment quite yet.

But the questions have started bubbling. She’s never been good at keeping her mouth shut.

“Will they keep their names? Or will they hide them away like you?”

She’s not sure how she feels about that. The Doctor’s title represents everything he personifies – sometimes she thinks he needed the reminder more than anyone. She fell in love with that persona, but it is the man beneath it who loves her – that lonely child from that orphanage on Gallifrey. She hopes her children need not be so conflicted, but they would choose well, she knows already, and perhaps all of time and space might benefit from it.

“That will be their choice. They’ll be free from the Academy and the Council. No one will force them to stare into the untempered schism. But if they wish to forge their own identity they shall be free to do that as well.”

She’s already done her best to change the darkness in his past. It’s now her job to fill his future with light. “I’ve always wondered what my Time Lady name would be,” she muses through a yawn.

He chuckles, just as she hoped, the melancholy lingering at the edge of his words chased away. “I figured that out long ago.”

“Did you now?” There’s something in his tone that warns her he intends to get a rise out of her; it had seemed inadvertent once, but after all these years she’s aware he knows exactly what he’s doing.

“You’d be The Boss for sure.” He laughs, a full out guffaw, and any slight she feels is eclipsed by overwhelming love.

Bloody hormones.

“I should be offended by that,” she acknowledges. “But you’re probably right.”       

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, there are actually two more quite pivotal scenes to this, but real life is kicking my butt. Someone, somewhere recently reminded me I’d left this quite abandoned and asked me for more, so I wanted to share what I’d written at least. Hopefully I can get the conclusion up by the end of the summer. Thanks to anyone who’s still reading this, and so sorry for the delay.


	6. Elysian Fields - Part 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "It's a wicked collusion between his offspring and his machine..." The Oswald twins decide it's time to visit some old friends.

The years pass in a glorious flurry of whimsy and madness. The girls are brilliant - even for Timelords, the Doctor claims – and fill both their house and the TARDIS with noise and laughter. They start traveling again when the twins are three and Clara is reminded of all those years of Wednesday pickups – they have every weekend to explore, but Rory must be back at school by Monday. Their precious human boy is a stabilizing force, bringing a sense of normalcy to their chaotic lives. They might be chasing ice monsters across Pluto on Sunday but there are parent teacher conferences on Tuesday night that remind Clara that she has papers to grade.

As Clara watches her children grow she is sometimes reminded that she has not, caught forevermore in the moment the Doctor’s blood was inked into her skin. It is not so different from her existence after the extraction chamber – except her heart beats now and she does not fear that she will unravel the universe. But she thinks of Lady Me sometimes, all that tragic, ancient melancholy that she masked with cold detachment. She’d become a friend, but now the thought of the ageless girl fills her with dread. She wakes once from a nightmare about the second time they met, frantic and pained, and the frenzy does not leave her.

The next night she starts a new journal.

He catches her at it a few months later. It’s nearly impossible to keep secrets from one another when they so frequently cross minds, but she never mentions it and he doesn’t ask. Then one day she watches him tell the children about their visit to Akhatan, and Amy interrupts constantly while Rory and Rose debate how a moon could possibly be living, and her heart swells with so much love that she slips away because she needs to preserve this moment.

He finds her in the library, the words spilling from her pen almost faster than she can capture them. She knows he’s there, can hear the slight hitch in his soft breathing, but she cannot make herself stop to look at him, lest the memory be lost forever. It’s just one of many – so so many – and the universe can never have enough paper to contain them all.

He doesn’t speak until she finishes. Her hand hurts from clenching the pen so tightly, but the words are inadequate, she knows. A terrible weak despair brews inside her, and she knows it’s an awful time for it to erupt. She’d rather have this cry alone, and smile when she sees him, and pretend she hasn’t foreseen the consequences.

“You’ve been journaling for seventy six days, but you never mention it. I don’t understand why.”

His vulnerability practically undoes her. She looks up to find him staring at her with sad eyes. He understands her far better now than he used to, but he’s still an alien, and a bloke at that. She wishes she could protect him from the truth, because he carries enough guilt. But they’ve sworn vows of honesty.

“Infinite lifespan. Finite human brain,” she answers, echoing Ashildr’s terrible explanation. The girl’s blankness at their second meeting still haunts her. Clara could not fathom it at the time, but now she fears falling down that rabbit hole more than almost anything else.

The Doctor’s eyebrows contract, but he doesn’t say anything, and her terror spills from her lips, sweeping her up in a hysteria she recognizes but cannot stem. “I don’t want to forget moments like tonight. The girls, so young – Rory. But I could, if we live long enough. Ashildr didn’t even remember meeting us, and you’re the reason she never died!”

She doesn’t regret their bond – she doesn’t – but sometimes she fears its consequences. It’s hypocritical, because she told him dozens of times when she was still mortal that he needed to live in the moment. But tonight she just can’t seem to make herself calm down.

He reaches out to clasp one hand on her shoulder, his fingers working at the muscles she’s tensed. His other hand reaches up to brush away her tears. As soon as he touches her something inside her releases, the misery losing some of its foothold. “Me was alone. That’s something you’ll never be. You can write in that book if it sooths you, but I’ll always be here to make sure you remember what’s truly important. If your memories fail, we can share mine.”

For a man so flummoxed by human emotion, sometimes he knew exactly what to say.

* * *

Amy and Rose cannot go to Clara’s school, where a scraped knee on the playground might lead to a nurse discovering their double heartbeat. So when the girls come of age Clara quits her job and the Oswalds take to schooling them full time. Clara teaches them literature while the Doctor teaches them maths, and the TARDIS shows them history in all its messy, timey-wimey glory. When Rory returns home each day he watches with a tight, sad smile. Once he even corrects the calculation scrawled across his father’s chalkboard, much to her sisters’ delight.

A few days before Rory turns eighteen he shows them his acceptance letter to Oxford.

It shouldn’t be surprising. Even hiding half of what he knows he’s still twice as smart as his classmates, and Oxford is a proper path towards the existence of Orson Pink. The Doctor catches him up in his arms after the announcement and swings him about like he’s still a small child and not practically a man and the family spends a week on a racing planet to celebrate. Clara laughs beside her family, the perfect doting mother in the day light, but each night she cries, the inevitability of his mortality stronger than it’s ever been.

The Doctor holds her tightly, wishing more than ever that he knew what to say to be a comfort. The problem this time is not that he does not understand – it’s that he understands too well. He remembers the hours he spent pacing around the console room, tormented by the discord in her timestream that promised he would lose her sooner rather than later, and all the nights he watched her sleep, anticipating the pain of their separation. He’s never found a proper salve to this agony – he just moves on, and starts again, and tries to forget. But there will be no forgetting Rory, not for Clara, and not for the Doctor either.

She’d told him so many things about cherishing the moments they were given, but he’s sure he’d garble her speeches. So he folds her into his body, and presses his lips to her forehead, and promises her that she’ll never be alone.

That’s the most comforting thing he’d been told, after all.

* * *

The day they leave Rory at Oxford they leave Earth behind as well. The Doctor keeps the mortgage but he doesn’t expect they’ll go back – not for any length of time – not when the walls sing with memories of the boy who brought them there, and tied them to that place with love.

They strike out across the universe, the girls urging them on. The old recklessness sings in their blood and they start to give in, just a little.

It’s the children’s fault, he tells himself, as if it’s a proper justification to be guided by the whims of younglings, when really it’s the spark in Clara’s eyes each time they land somewhere new that drives him. She’s running to forget, but he can hardly condemn the tactics that have kept him sane for thousands of years.

When the twins are twelve he teaches them to drive the TARDIS. This leads to a wicked collusion between his offspring and his machine, but he lets them take the helm regardless of the mischief promised in their eyes. There’s something thrilling about opening the doors onto someplace unknown, collecting clues and listening to his senses until he can discern their location. He imagines this is how his companions must have felt – how many times had he and Rose played this game? The TARDIS keeps them safe – generally – but provides enough distractions to keep them from dwelling on the reality that their son is growing up on Earth without them.

It is a day like any other when he strides outside the TARDIS doors, Clara at his heels. The familiar air is stale – American – with a heavy tinge of brine. There is change in the air, reliable coal replaced by newfangled oil as a harbinger of progress to come. A boy sells papers at the edge of the boardwalk. The Doctor flashes him his psychic paper so he can take a look.

“New Jersey,” he reads with disgust. “Why ever would our children bring us here?”

But suddenly he is enveloped by familiar arms, his vision flooded red, and he _knows,_ even before he hears that glorious, unmistakable timber declare, “I knew I’d see you again!”

“Amelia.” The syllables fall thickly for the first time from his now old lips. She is Amy in all the stories, and even at her worst behavior his daughter’s name is never lengthened. She had not been Amelia in a very long time but he is too overwhelmed to censor himself.

Except she is not seeing him again, not really, and as she pulls back enough to take in his altered appearance he watches the way her eyes widen and then narrow. “You’ve changed,” she says, and he steals himself against her inevitable rejection. Regenerations are always hard on his companions, and though they usually come around with time that isn’t a gift he’s privileged to have. Though he’s grateful for the meddling that has caused their paths to cross again he’d rather they parted ways as friends instead of strangers.

“Yeah. What do you think?” He tries for nonchalant, but even he can tell he sounds needy. It shouldn’t matter – Clara loves him, gray hair and wrinkles and all. But it does, and anxiety blooms in his chest. He’d been lost when he met Amy, and she’d made him into the man who’d become the man who loves Clara. He wanted her to approve of who he’d become, but he looked a far cry from the bow-tied buffoon who’d sealed up cracks and retroactively solved all her childhood problems.

“You’re Scottish!” she declares with a delighted laugh, and she throws her arms around him again.

“Lord help us. Now there’s two of them.”

Amy pulls away to swat at her husband. “Be nice!” she scolds.

“Doctor,” Rory says with an easy grin, looking more confident than the Doctor could recall. He extends his arm for a handshake. After a moment of hesitation the Doctor decides to defy expectations and pulls him into a hug.

Amy laughs again like a crisp fall breeze. “You figured it out, huh? That you could come back and see us as long as we were outside the city.”

“Actually …” He contemplates the easy lie. He’d had no such thought, but he should have. Instead he had wallowed, and mourned, and protected himself from another goodbye.

“I would call this meeting coincidental, but I think your namesake may have orchestrated it.”

The girl in question flounces forward, laughing, and executes an exaggerated courtesy while her sister cheers, fourteen going on four hundred, mischief personified with far too many brains. “The amount of unfinished business on the TARDIS is suffocating.”

Not deigning to justify that with a response, he tilts his head towards his offspring. “Amy and Rose Oswald. My daughters.”

Rory’s face scrunches up as he studies them. “Wait. You named the blond Amy?”

“We’re Timelords. Our physical traits are temporary constructs. I could have purple hair next year, and red hair next millennia.”

Rory chuckles at Amy’s sass. “Got that one right then.”

“Oi!” His Amy smacks at him again, the back of her hand finding his chest instinctively because she never turns away from the twins. “Look at you with kids. We must have been gone a long time.”

“You have no idea.” He is not particularly inclined to give her one, the unexpected joy at her presence eclipsing the memory of her loss.

“Never thought I’d see the day,” Amy muses. “Is that the poor girl you convinced to procreate with you?”

The Doctor spins to grab Clara by the shoulders and push her forward. “Oh yes. This is my—”

“Wife,” she says at the exact moment he says, “Clara.”

There’s something perplexingly abrasive radiating from her that he’s in no hurry to decipher. “My wife, Clara,” he clarifies, grinning.

“Pleasure to meet you,” Clara says, but she doesn’t sound like she means it.

“Actually you’ve met before,” he corrects, hoping to dispel the awkwardness by drawing on a shared experience. It’s something he’d learned from one of Clara’s cards, long ago. “On the Dalek asylum.” He leans toward her and pitches his voice with great disgust. “You flirted with him.” His eyes flick to Rory.

“Oswin Oswald, Starship Alaska.” Her response is almost programmed, robotic, but the phrasing is so familiar he must keep himself from shivering at the remembrance of Oswin’s demise. He’d worried for years whenever Clara regained a memory from an echo, but he’d studied her brain extensively from both inside it and without and he’s never noticed any ill effects.

“Sorry. Memory overload.” She shakes her head as if to clear them away. Her resulting smirk worries him more than the potential repercussion of her many lives. “I did flirt with him quite shamelessly, didn’t I? You weren’t pleased at all.”

“Obviously your mind was addled by the conversion process. You weren’t thinking clearly with all that foreign tech in your head.”

“Doctor,” Rory interrupts. “Didn’t Oswin die?” he asks, tentative again. “And wasn’t she a Dalek?”

“Oswin was an echo,” he corrects. “Clara here is the original. I got into a spot of trouble with a pompous snowman and she fractured herself across my timestream to save me.”

“Sounds about right,” Amy says with a laugh.

“Ahem.” A young man lurks at the edge of their reunion. The Doctor looks twice and realizes that it is not, indeed, the paper boy. “Aren’t you going to introduce us to your alien friends?” He has dark hair, a dimpled chin, and a devilish smile. His voice is jarringly American.

Amy rolls her eyes, but the smile that follows is unmistakably fond. “This is our son, Thomas. And the girl hiding behind him is his sister, Annabelle.”

“I thought you couldn’t have any more children,” he blurts, perplexed by how little these siblings resemble either of his friends. Clara stomps on his foot, hard.

“Rude?” he asks, glancing to his side to find that she’s glaring.

“Mmm-hmm.”

“But how else am I supposed to get an explanation if I don’t ask for one?”

“It’s all right,” Amy absolves. Her hand reaches out to link with Rory’s. The Doctor recognizes the comfort in the gesture, the way it smooths away the lines in her face that his allusion to what Madam Kovarian did to her had placed there. “Technically they’re adopted. But that doesn’t make them any less ours. Family isn’t always blood. Someone taught us that once. Floppy hair. Manic disposition. Idiotic obsession with bow ties.”

“Bow ties are cool,” he answers, instinctively, but with the sense this version of him has acquired he realizes, almost instantly, why so many people had argued against such a proposition.

“You really are still the same.” Amy stares at him with such fondness that he cannot bring himself to correct her. Clara slips her hand into his, her fingers warm and grounding.

“I just have one other question,” he declares.

“Only one?”

“Whatever are you wearing?”

Amy glances down at the polka dotted skirted monstrosity and laughs.

“This is what passes for a swimsuit in this backwards decade. God, I miss bikinis.”

“So do I,” Rory offers.

All the children groan simultaneously. Then Thomas laughs and the girls follow, dissolving into a frivolous display that seems a lot like _bonding_.

He clears his throat, slightly put out by the joke he does not understand. “But why are you wearing a swimsuit?”

“Because we’re at the beach, silly. Nothing like Space Florida, but it’ll do for a quick holiday.”

“A holiday we were supposed to be enjoying by the sea, until someone got distracted.”

Amy has a special brand of cross reserved just for Rory, which is all scowl and no bite. “That raccoon had a gun! That’s not normal. I just suggested that we investigate. The sea will still be there once we’re finished.”

“It’s unlikely it’s a raccoon. No opposable thumbs. There’s a rodent on the Sontaron homeworld that looks remarkably similar but is notably more advanced. Or there’s always the possibility of a shapeshifter.”

“Sounds dangerous. We could probably use an expert, if you have the time.” There had always been something about Amy that reeled him in, even against his better judgement. That had made him willing to travel with a child, until his TARDIS made him wait until she reached a more reasonable age. After she had grown all she had to do was cock her head or raise those fiery eyebrows and he was ready to follow. Even now, there is still something in her tone that beckons to him, that reminds him he’d been younger once, and one of her boys.

But he isn’t hers any longer, and a different woman fights the TARDIS over control of his steps. He looks to Clara, who seems to be trying to make herself as puffed up as possible.

“Please, Mum,” Rose begs, and in that moment it is shocking how much she looks like Amy. Which in this case does not seem to be working in her favor.

 _Please_ , he echoes, glad he and Clara are still holding hands so he can whisper directly into her mind. He will leave if she refuses, but he yearns for this final adventure with an intensity he cannot hide.

 _Fine_ , she relents. _But we better not be late._

 _Thank you_. He feels his grin radiate through both his hearts. “It would be awful irresponsible of me to refuse. Protector of the Earth and all that. Lead the way, Pond.”

* * *

He’d never mentioned she was Scottish.

Clara had heard countless stories about Amy Pond and her doting husband, always told in tones of reverence. How at twelve years old she’d imprinted herself on him by serving fish fingers and custard on the night of his regeneration. How Vincent Van Gogh himself has sensed Amy’s sadness when Rory had disappeared into a crack in time. How the couple had kept setting places for him at their table, even though he’d let them believe he was dead. How they’d been River’s parents without knowing it, and had forgiven him for her loss.

But he’d never once mentioned that this striking beauty, with hair too red to be believed and legs for days, spoke with the same emotive brogue that Clara had grown to love.

“I think we’ve lost them,” Amy rasps in that self-same accent as they duck into an alleyway. There was not, in fact, just one alien raccoon on the boardwalk – there was a whole colony, and while the Doctor had declared them harmless enough they had not appreciated being cornered.

“And everyone else too,” Clara counters.

“The kids will look after the boys,” Amy declares with breezy dismissal. “I need to catch my breath for a mo. Been a while since I’ve done so much runnin’.”

Clara wants to snap that just yesterday she’d run through a circus on Neptune, and the day before had been ancient Rome, but she recognizes the pettiness and holds her tongue.

But she can’t help sizing up her companion as the woman sinks back against the wall, panting slightly. She’s stunning, but there are lines around her eyes that Clara never sees when she looks in the mirror – will probably never see, even once she’s earned them.

She realizes too late that Amy has noticed her attention, and is scrutinizing her in turn. “He seems happy,” the beauty says, far too tentative.

“He is!” Clara snarls, unable to stand the implication that their marriage has been anything but blissful. Even if he does drive her up the wall sometimes, she is a fine catch, and her coming into his life was the luckiest thing to happen to him in thousands of years…

“Cool it, sister. It was never like that between us. I kissed him once – in a moment of curiosity – but all he did was flail about and remind me I had a fiancé. Technically I’m his mother-in-law.” She says those final words with mock disgust, her accent particularly thick but then she freezes – perhaps because she sees the look on Clara’s face. “Was his mother-in-law,” she amends.

Suddenly Clara’s the one on the defensive and she isn’t sure what to say, because as much as this woman intimates her she would never take joy in reminding anyone of the loss of a child. “River,” she starts but she doesn’t know how to finish. Clara holds no grudges against the illustrious professor, but nothing she knows about her seems appropriate to share with her mother.

“It’s all right,” Amy says. “Best not to explain. She still pops in every once in a while, so she’s still alive to us. But ages could have passed for him. And it’s not like they ever had a normal marriage. I prefer not to think of it, really.”

Clara knows more about the nature of that marriage than Amy seems to. The fact that the other woman can discuss it so calmly makes her realize how ridiculous she’s being. “I’m not normally the jealous type.” She decides, after she says it, that that’s only true because he hasn’t given her a reason to be in so many years. “But you obviously meant a lot to him.”

Something in Amy’s smile reminds Clara of the way he’d looked at her on Trenzalore when she’d returned to confront him about her feelings, the resignation of loss not undoing the fondness, but somehow making it sad. “I wasn’t saying that I didn’t think you could make him happy. I just didn’t expect it. When we got separated – it was sudden. He took it hard. I had to leave him, to be with Rory. I know I made the right choice. But I worried, all this time. Because he’s no good on his own, but I thought that maybe he’d be too hurt to find someone. I’m glad I was wrong.”

Clara cannot help but think of Trap Street, when she’d feared the Doctor’s ruin on her behalf more than her own death. Her heart swells with affinity for this woman, who cared so deeply for the Doctor and understood him in a way most of those he saved did not. Clara had realized long ago how important each companion had been to his development, had not even balked when he’d suggested naming their children after this woman and his former love. She would simply have to accept that some of those women had been beautiful as well as smart and brave.

She finds, suddenly, that she does not wish Amy to think her absence went unmourned. “He did mope about, afterwards. Hid on a cloud, above Victorian London, until he found a mystery worth solving.”

That does seem to ease Amy a bit. “Did you know him, back when he was … “

Clara raises an eyebrow, catching her drift. “Your Doctor?”

“Wasn’t gonna say it that way in case you screeched at me again – but yes.”

She lets that pass, understanding the ownership she feels toward the Doctor’s current self because she was the first one he saw. “Yeah. I was the mystery, actually. He kept running into me, and I kept dying.”

“Now that sounds like Rory,” Amy chuckles. “I’m so glad we’ve broken that pattern.”

There are very few things that Clara’s been more glad of herself. “It was rather dreadful.”

“A bit.” Amy fidgets, her uncertainty seeming out of place. Clara wonders if maybe she’s a touch intimidated as well. “How did it happen? If you don’t mind me asking. Because he told us he couldn’t change again. That he’d used them all up.”

“He had.” Clara has never liked to think about Trenzalore. Even now that she’s long rectified his apparent personality shift and fully understands that he’s still the same in all the ways that matter it still feels like a death. She still recalls the pain of his apparent rejection with biting clarity. But she knows it could have been worse. She knows he might never have regenerated at all, and died on that planet for good, as he’d expected to. “He made his final stand on a little planet that needed him, and he sent me away to live my life. But I begged the Timelords to give him another chance, because he’d done so much for them. And for once in their self-righteous lives they listened. Or they knew they’d need him again, probably.”

“I thought the Timelords were gone.”

“So did he. But they were just hiding. He’d saved them, and forgotten.”

Amy laughs, and Clara has to admit it’s a glorious sound. “Married, and not the last of his kind after all. That’s brilliant!”

Amy’s joy is infectious so Clara grins back. “I suppose it is.”

“And your daughters. Are they … like him?”

“They have two hearts a piece and some Time Lord DNA. We expect they’ll be able to regenerate, but we hope not to find out for quite some time.”

“But he’ll never be alone again.”

“Actually …” Clara rubs at the golden sigil at her wrist. “The girls won’t be the only ones not to leave him.”

“He’s got the same tattoo, yeah? Did he eat too many jammy dodgers and then convince you to get matching ones, because I can picture every part of that except why you agreed.”

Clara barks out a laugh, because although that’s not something she thinks her Doctor would do, the former version definitely would. “There was this planet, and this ritual. I’ll live as long as him now.”

“That’s—” Amy breaks out into a grin, apparently speechless. She starts, shakes her head, starts again. “Rory will be glad to hear that too. All that worryin’, and he’s better than fine. Though you must have the patience of a saint, taking him on for who knows how long. Least his fashion sense seems to have improved.”

“I miss the bow ties, actually.”

“Ha! And that’s why you could marry him and I never could.” Amy stands, dusts herself off, and extends a hand. “Best find the others before the Doctor gets them in too much trouble.”

Clara is surprised when the lift up turns into a tight hug. “Thank you for looking after him,” Amy whispers. “I’m sorry I kissed him once.”

All the antagonism she felt feels absolutely silly now, and she hopes the Doctor didn’t notice. The girls probably did, but they have enough tact not to mention it. And they are easily bribed. “I’m sorry I flirted with your husband,” she offers, sincerely.

Amy pulls away with a smirk. “That’s all right. Good for his ego. Good for the Doctor’s too, not to be the center of attention for once.”

* * *

There’s something different about Clara and Amy, but the Doctor doesn’t notice it until the Sontaran war-rats are sent back to their ship, which Amy the younger had managed to repair with a few hairpins and some salt-water taffy. Afterwards they all finally make it to the sea, where the children play in the surf and the adults exchange stories about the years that have passed.

Clara had been positively bristling when they’d first arrived but she’s perfectly at ease now, and had even situated her beach blanket next to Amy’s. Although they’re all part of a larger conversation, on occasion one of the females leans towards the other and whispers something the Doctor can’t hear, which always results in rather unseemly _giggling_.

After one such occasion he pitches towards Rory, but is careful to retain a respectable distance and tone. “This seems rather not-good. I’m afraid they might be conspiring against us.”

Rory’s wry smile does nothing to dispel the Doctor’s nerves. “Mels and Amy used to do this all the time. You get used to it.”

Despite his unease it’s an amenable time. Age, parenthood, and America seem to suit both the Pond’s, and he is relieved by how well they’ve adjusted. He is able to boast of his adjustment as well, and while there are plenty of dodgy points he is careful to avoid, Amy and Rory both seem to approve of how he has settled into his roles of husband and father, although they remain skeptical he’d managed more than three hours grounded in Arizona.

He’s having such a fine afternoon that when the TARDIS phone rings from the edge of the dunes he feels no urgency to answer it.

“Doctor,” Amy hisses, looking around the crowded beach. “If that keeps ringing someone’s going to notice.”

“A payphone is far less of an anomaly in this decade than the one you came from. Besides, haven’t you realized that no one ever notices? If it’s important, they’ll call Clara.”

A few seconds later Clara’s mobile begins to ring. Her face lights up as she reads the caller ID, and the Doctor listens carefully to her half of the conversation.

“Hello, love.”

“Course we’ll be there.”

“No we won’t be late. That’s why we have a time machine.”

“I’ll let you sisters drive.”

“Just a minute.” Clara covers the speaker with her hand and holds the phone towards him. “ _Your son_ says the ceremony is starting in five minutes and he’d like to remind you that you promised we wouldn’t be late.”

“Why is he only _my son_ when you’re cross with me and _our son_ the rest of the time? Technically he’s not even _my_ son—”

“That’s an argument you can’t win, mate,” Rory offers.

“Smart man,” Clara declares and then pushes the phone into the Doctor’s hand.

“Happy Wedding Day, Rory,” the Doctor crows, his excitement about the big event returning now that he’s remembered where they were off to before the girls got them sidetracked with one more trip. “Not to worry, we’ll be there in a jiff.”

“Where are you?  It’s time to stand at the altar and none of my family’s here yet.” Rory’s voice, which is always calm in the craziest of circumstances, sounds a bit hysterical.

The Doctor feels just a tad guilty for getting so distracted. “Erm. New Jersey, 1940s or thereabouts. Met some old friends. Not important at this moment. The nerves have kicked in, haven’t they? Look, we’ll be there and I’m sorry it wasn’t earlier. Your mum will give me hell for that. But as soon as you get one look at Lizzie it won’t matter who else is in the room, I promise you. This is your moment, just the two of you. You’ll hang on to it in the darkest of times. So breathe, and cherish it. But you just wait until the reception. That’s when your old dad will really shine. I am a particularly fine wedding dancer.”

Just as he hoped, Rory emits a strangled chuckle and the tension breaks. “It’s going to be marvelous. We’ll be right there, son.”

“Four minutes,” Rory reiterates. “Let the girls drive.” Then he hangs up.

The phone call had drawn the children’s attention, and they are clustered about, wrapped in towels.

“We’re late,” Amy declares, a simple statement of fact, while Rose tells Thomas, “Our brother worries about things like that.”

The Doctor thinks he hears Annabelle respond, “My brother doesn’t worry about anything.”

“We promised,” Clara says, slightly agonized, and he hates the disappointment in her voice that he could have avoided.

“I know. We’ll be there. The TARDIS won’t let us miss it. Though he should have called earlier, or not at all. Now we can’t get there more than 4 minutes early without crossing the timelines. Rory knows that. He’s normally the level headed one.”

“Hold on, you named your son Rory?” the original Rory asks, a bit off-color.

“The lad was loyal and patient from the start. No other name would have been appropriate.”

The Doctor’s utterly gob smacked with Rory blinks at him and then starts leaking.

Thankfully, Amelia saves the day by looping her arm around her husband’s neck and declaring, “Sounds about right.” Then Clara distracts them both by showing a few photos on her mobile.

“Family isn’t always blood,” the Doctor echoes, circumventing any questions about the obvious physical difference. “It’s rather a long story. I’m afraid there isn’t time to explain. We really must be going.”  Rory and Amy are still caught in a half embrace and as the Doctor watches them something catches in the back of his throat. This is always the part that he hates, the goodbyes almost as bitter as the absence that comes afterwards.

He is not ready for it yet.

“Unless … There’d surely be some free time during the reception. We know the groom quite well, and I’m sure we’re paying for – something – probably – no one will mind if we bring a few guests. What do you say? One last trip, for old time’s sake?”

Amy and Rory look at each other, a whole conversation silently passing between them without even a telepathic link.

“We can’t.” Amy steps away from Rory, and the Doctor tries to hide how much it hurts.

“Of course not. It was a silly idea.”

“We’ve built lives here, ones that actually matter. So have the children. And we both know it wouldn’t be just one trip. We’ve tried that before, yeah?” Suddenly she is right before him, her hand reaching out to rest on his cheek. “But that’s okay. Because this is a new face, one that has found other faces that won’t fade from it. And I’m so glad of that.” Her lips brush again his forehead, and then she sinks into the crook of his neck, her arms coming around him fiercely for just a few precious moments before she retreats.

“The problem is the TARDIS can’t go back to Manhattan without creating a paradox, right?” Clara asks.

The Doctor spins towards her, hoping the movement will dislodge the tear that escaped from his eye. Amy and Rory had taught him so much about human emotion that sometimes it infected him quite without permission. He rocks back on his heels. “Yeah. Not in any decade. Never again, I’m afraid.”

“But it’s only New York, not the rest of Earth.”

“Obviously. We spend a proportionally large amount of time on Earth and the universe hasn’t imploded.”

“We don’t have any married friends. And the girls know frightfully few people their own age.”

The change of topic throws him off kilter and he narrows his eyes. “Timelords don’t have married friends. They’re a bit skeptical on the necessity of friends, honestly. And marriage.”

“You’re missing the point, love.”

“Then enlighten me.”

“Joint holidays,” Clara crows, and the possibilities spread out before him like the cosmos. “If the Williams can’t come with us, we’ll just have to go to them. There’s a whole wide planet we can meet on, we just need to pick a place and a date. Let’s say one year from today.”

“My clever, clever girl,” he exclaims, picking her up and swinging her about. It’s not until he hears Amy’s laughter that he thinks to ask the Ponds, “What do you say to that?”

“I say that I’ve always wanted an excuse to see Chicago.”

“Chicago it is!”

“Perhaps we can do some actual sightseeing without unearthing an alien threat,” Rory suggests.

“Don’t hold your breath.”

Without any finality behind them the goodbyes are only a cheery formality. The girls scurry into the TARDIS to get ready, leaving the Doctor behind.  After an awkward clap on the back Rory leads his children away, but Amy lingers. They’ve done this so many times and yet his hearts still clench. “Do me a favor. Don’t dance at the wedding.  You’ll mortify the boy.”

“Rory likes my dancing!”

“You’re either delusional or he’s a very convincing liar.”

“Rory doesn’t lie. He’s the honest one in the family.”

“Delusional then. Sounds about right.” She pulls him into another embrace, and he hasn’t asked Rory or Clara for permission but he can’t seem to help it. It has been so long, and he’d never expected to do this again. “See you later, Old Man,” she whispers.

“I don’t think I like that,” he declares as he pulls away.

Her eyes sparkle as she teases him. “I don’t think you get a vote.” She is older – she must be – but all he can see is her hair and her sass, thrumming with _life_. She is safe and happy – not broken and lost – and he has not failed her, as he feared for so long.

It is the best gift his daughters have given him, aside from their existence.

As the TARDIS door closes he hears her call, “Love the voice, though.”

 


End file.
